Htbena^um press Bevies 

POEMS OF TENNYSON 



EDITED BY 

HENRY VAN DYKE 

AND 

D. LAURANCE CHAMBERS, A.M. 

Assistant in English, Princeton University 



■-i>*4- 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 
GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

1903 



1 



THE LIBRAHY OF 
CONGPESS. 



Two Copies Recoivef. j 

OCT 17 ^0^ j 

CLASS «t XXc. Nc 
U t^ L -L 



COPY a. 



7 



fffiSO- 



Copyright, 1903 
By henry van DYKE 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



PREFACE 



This book was planned and begun seven years ago, to meet 
what seemed to me a real want in English Literature : a full 
and representative selection of the best poems of Tennyson, 
arranged so as to show the variety of his work, the growth 
of his art, and the qualities of his poetry, and printed in a 
single volume not too large to hold in the hand or carry in 
a fair-sized pocket. 

Of course, I had no notion that such a volume could take 
the place of Tennyson's Complete Works. But it would have 
a purpose and use of its own. It would be a friendly book 
for familiar reading, on a journey or a vacation-ramble. It 
would serve as a good manual for closer study with an intel- 
ligent class. It would help the understanding of the com- 
plete works. There is a distinct gain in presenting, within a 
small compass, a body of the best things that a man has done, 
disengaged and set apart from the mass of his productions. 
It simpHfies the view and makes it easier to appreciate the 
vital meaning of his work. 

I trust that the present volume may be acceptable and 
useful in this way. No other book of selections from Tenny- 
son, of the same kind and scope, has been made hitherto. 
His own selection (dedicated to the "Working Men of Eng- 
land" and sold in threepenny numbers) was printed in 1865, 
before the writing of some of his most important poems. 
Mr. Palgrave's selection (1885) was confined to lyrical verse. 



vi PREFACE 

Mr. Ainger's selection (1891) was intended for young readers. 
Dr. Rolfe's scholarly little volumes (1884, 1887) contain only 
forty-eight pieces in all. The present volume contains one 
hundred and thirty-six selections, chosen from all the fields 
of Tennyson's poetry, except the dramas, from which it was 
impossible to detach representative scenes, although three of 
the interspersed lyrics are given. 

It is not to be supposed that all readers will find here 
every poem of Tennyson which they have learned for personal 
reasons to like or to love. I have reluctantly omitted a 
number of those which I might have put in, if the book 
had been meant solely for my own use. So far as possible 
I have tried to make the book for general service, and on 
grounds of broad critical judgment rather than of mere 
personal partiality. Whatever has been left out, at least I 
feel confident that nothing has been taken in which does 
not deserve, for one reason or another, to have a place in 
such a book. 

The text of the poems is that of Tennyson's latest revision. 
This represents his own preference as to final form, and is, 
upon the whole, the best version in almost every case. The 
only exception which I have ventured to make is the lyric out 
of which the monodrama of Maud was unfolded (p. 167). For 
this the earhest text has been used, taken from The T?'ibiitey 
1837, where the poem first appeared. No attempt has been 
made to give a complete list of various readings. But prac- 
tically every important change from the original text of the 
poems has been carefully noted, and in many cases the reason 
for the change has been explained. Thus, unless I am mis- 
taken, the book gives a fuller and clearer view of Tennyson's 
methods in the revision of his verse, than is to be found 
anywhere else. 



PREFACE vu 

The plan of the volume mcluded several features which 
seemed to me likely to add to its permanent value. First, a 
general introduction, giving a survey of Tennyson's relation 
to his times; then, a clear account of his life; then, a study 
of the way in which he used his material and worked over its 
form ; and finally an estimate of the leading qualities which 
characterize his poetry. Then, I wished to add a general note 
of a descriptive nature on each poem, giving, as far as possible, 
its date and history, the source, or sources, drawn upon in its 
construction, and a condensed statement of its theme, and 
pointing out its metrical structure and peculiarities. I thought 
that this might be especially useful because Tennyson, from 
his central position and his mastery of the poetic art, would 
be a good subject for a class to take up in beginning the study 
of modern English verse. 

In carrying out the last part of this plan, and enlarging it 
by the addition of many textual notes, I am much indebted 
to the scholarly and painstaking assistance of my collaborator, 
Mr. D. Laurance Chambers, who has worked with me during 
the past year. He has verified the references, worked out 
almost all of the textual changes and a majority of the notes, 
traced some of the material to sources never before identified, 
discovered many errors and inaccuracies of other commen- 
tators, corrected the proofs, and thus contributed largely to 
the completion of the book. For this reason I wish his name 
to stand with mine upon the title-page. Grateful acknowledg- 
ments should be made also to Dr. Hardin Craig for his kind 
assistance in verifying certain references at the British Museum, 
and to Dr. W. P. Woodman for his aid with some of the 
classical notes. 

It is my hope that the book may be welcome to those who 
like to read good poetry and understand its meaning. If the 



viii PREFACE 

lovers of Tennyson find here anything that helps them to a 
new appreciation of his work, either in its hmitations or in its 
excellences ; if teachers and students can use the volume as a 
text-book in the study of Nineteenth Century Enghsh poetry ; 
I shall be glad. Impartial criticism, on broad lines, in the 
introduction ; careful commentary on particular points, in the 
notes ; these are the things that have been aimed at. Their 
value, much or Httle, lies in the light which they throw upon 
the poems. 

Tennyson's popularity has been great. This has been urged, 
in some highly aesthetic circles, as an argument against his 
fame. If the purpose of this book is attained, it will help to 
show that poetry which is popular may also be noble. It will 
contribute to a clear and just estimate of a poet whose name is 
one of the enduring glories of the English-speaking world. 

HENRY VAN DYKE. 

AVALON 

June nth, 1903. 



CONTENTS 

Introduction : p^^ge 

I. Tennyson's Place in the Nineteenth Century . xv 

II. An Outline of Tennyson's Life ... xx 

III. Tennyson's Use of his Sources .... xxxv 

IV. Tennyson's Revision of his Text ... lii 
V. The Classification of Tennyson's Poems . . Ixvi 

VI. The Qualities of Tennyson's Poetry . . Ixxi 

Memoranda : 

I. A Metrical Note ciii 

II. A Bibliographical Note cxv 

POEMS 

Thefigi'ires in parefitheses refer to the pas;es of the Notes 

I. Melodies and Pictures: 

Claribel (315) 3 

Song (316) 4 

The Throstle (317) 5 

Far — Far — Away (317) 5 

"Move eastward, happy earth" (318) . . . . . 6 

The Snowdrop (318) . . . . . 7 

A Farewell (319) 7 

Songs from The Princess (319) . . . . . 8 

The Little Grave (320) * . 8 

" Sweet and low " (320) ....... 8 

The Bugle Song (321) 9 

The Battle (321) 10 

"Sweet my child, I live for thee" (322) .... 10 

" Ask me no more " (323) 11 

" Tears, idle tears " (323) 11 

The Sw'allow's Message (324) ^ . . . . 12 
ix^-'''^ 



CONTENTS 

Songs from The Princess — continued. Pagb 

Serenade (325) -13 

A Small Sweet Idyl (325) 14 

Songs from Other Poems (326) . . . . . -15 

The Song of the Brook (326) 15 

Cradle-Song (328) 17 

Mother-Song (328) 18 

Enid's Song (329) 18 

Vivien's Song (329) . 19 

Elaine's Song (330) . . 19 

Milking-Song (330) 20 

The Queen's Song (330) 21 

Duet of Henry and Rosamund (331) . . . . 21 

Ode to Memory (331) 22 

The Beggar Maid [233) 26 

Recollections of the Arabian Nights {22>3) .... 27 

The Daisy {2,Z^) 32 

Early Spring (340) 2,6 

The Dying Swan (341) 38 

The Eagle (342) 39 

The Oak (342) 40 

The Sea-Fairies (342) 40 

The Lotos-Eaters (345) 42 

Isabel (350) 48 

Mariana (351) 50 

A Dream of Fair Women (353) ...... 53 

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere (362) .... 63 



II. Ballads, Idyls, and Character-Pieces: 

(i) Ballads: 

The Lady of Shalott (363) ...... 65 

The May Queen (368) ........ 71 

In the Children's Hospital (370) 78 

The Charge of the Light Brigade (372) ... 82 

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava (375) . 84 

The Revenge (376) 87 

(2) English Idyls : 

The Gardener's Daughter (380) 92 

Dora (382) loi 



CONTENTS xi 

(3) Character-Pieces : Pagb 

(Enone (383) , . . 107 

Ulysses (390) 116 

Tithonus (393) 118 

Lucretius (394) 121 

St. Agnes' Eve (397) 130 

Sir Galahad (398) 131 

Northern Farmer. Old Style (399) 134 

Northern Farmer. New Style (401) .... 138 

Locksley Hall (402) 141 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere (407) . . . • • 152 
Selections from Maud ; a Monodrama (407) . . -155 

Part I, v 155 

XI 156 

XII 156 

XVII 158 

XVIII 159 

XXII 162 

Part II, ii 165 

III 166 

IV 167 

Rizpah (412) . . . , 171 



III. Selections from Epic Poems: 

The Princess, Book VII (414) 177 

Guinevere (418) 186 

Morte d'Arthur (424) 208 



IV. Personal and Philosophic Poems: 
(i) Of the Poet and His Art : 

The Poet (429) 217 

The Poet's Song (430) 219 

To (431) 220 

The Palace of Art (431) . ..... . . 221 

Merlin and The Gleam (434) 232 

" Frater Ave atque Vale " (435) 237 

To Virgil (436) 2-37 

Milton (437) 239 



xii CONTENTS 

(2) Of Patriotism : Page 
" Of old sat Freedom on the heights " (437) . . . 240 
England and America in 1782 (438) . . . . 241 

To the Queen (438) 242 

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (439) . 243 

(3) Of the Life of the Spirit : 

The Vision of Sin (445) ^5^C^ 

The Ancient Sage (446) 261 

" Flower in the crannied wall " (449) .... 270 

The Higher Pantheism (449) 270 

Will (450) 271 

Wages (451) 272 

The Deserted House (451) 273 

"Break, break, break" (451) 274 

In the Valley of Cauteretz (452) 274 

Selections from In Memoriam (452) .... 275 

Prologue 275 

I 276 

VII 277 

IX 277 

XI 278 

XIX 279 

XXI . . • 280 

XXIII 281 

xxvii 282 

XXVII t 282 

XXXI 283 

XXXII 284 

XXXII 1 285 

XXXV 1 285 

XLV 286 

XLVII 287 

1 287 

LIV 288 

LV 289 

LXX 290 

LXXIV 290 

LXXVIII 291 

LXXXII 292 

I.XXXIII 292 



CONTENTS xiii 

Selections from In Memoriam — continued. Page 

Lxxxv .293 

Lxxxvi 297 

LXXXVIII 298 

xc 299 

xcvi 300 

CIV 301 

cvi 301 

CXI 302 

cxv 303 

cxviii 304 

cxix 305 

cxx 306 

cxxiii 306 

cxxiv 307 

cxxvi 308 

cxxx 308 

cxxxi 309 

Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets (476) . . 310 

Vastness (476) 311 

Crossing the Bar (478) 314 

Notes on the Poems 315 

Classification of Metres 479 



INTRODUCTION 



TENNYSON'S PLACE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

" The voice of him the master and the sire 
Of one whole age and legion of the lyre, 
Who sang his morning-song when Coleridge still 
Uttered dark oracles from Highgate Hill, 
And with new launched argosies of rhyme 
Gilds and makes brave this sombreing tide of time. 



To him nor tender nor heroic muse 

Did her divine confederacy refuse : 

To all its moods the lyre of life he strung, 

And notes of death fell deathless from his tongue, 

Himself the Merlin of his magic strain, 

He bade old glories break in bloom again ; 

And so, exempted from oblivious gloom. 

Through him these days shall fadeless break in bloom." 

William Watson, 1892. 



I 



Tennyson seems to us, at the beginning of the Twentieth 
Century, the most representative poet of the EngHsh race 
in the Nineteenth Century. Indeed it is doubtful whether 
any other writer during the last hundred years has reflected 
so clearly and so broadly, in verse or prose, the features of 
that composite age. The history of its aspirations and con- 
flicts, its dreams and disappointments, its aesthetic revivals and 
scientific discoveries, its questioning spirit in religion and its 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

dogmatic spirit in practical affairs, its curious learning and 
social enthusiasms and military reactions, its ethical earnest- 
ness, and its ever deepening and broadening human sympathy, 
may be read in the poetry of Tennyson. 

Other poets may reflect some particular feature of the cen- 
tury more fully, but it is because they reflect it more exclu- 
sively. Thus Byron stands for the spirit of revolt against 
tyranny, Shelley for the dream of universal brotherhood, 
Keats for the passionate love of pure beauty, Matthew Arnold 
for the sadness of parting with ancient faiths, Robert Brown- 
ing for the spirit of scientific curiosity and the restless impulse 
of action, and Rudyard Kipling expresses the last phase of 
the century, the revival of militant imperialism, perhaps as 
well as it can be uttered in verse. 

Wordsworth, indeed, has a more general range, at least of 
meditative sympathy, and his work has therefore a broader 
significance. But his range of imaginative sympathy, the 
sphere within which he feels intensely and speaks vividly, is 
limited by his own individuality, deep, strong, unyielding, and 
by his secluded Ufe among the mountains of Westmoreland. 
When he moves along his own line his work shines with a 
singular and unclouded lustre ; at other times his genius fails 
to penetrate his material with the light of poesy. Much of 
his verse, serious and sincere, represents Wordsworth's reflec- 
tions upon life, rather than the reflection of life in Words- 
worth's poetry. In the art of poetry, too, perfect as he is in 
certain forms, such as the sonnet, the simple lyric, the stately 
ode, his mastery is far from wide. In narrative poetry he 
seldom moves with swiftness or certainty ; in the use of dra- 
matic motives to intensify a lyric, a ballad, an idyl, he has 
little skill. 

But Tennyson, at least in the maturity of his powers, has 
not only a singularly receptive and responsive mind, open on 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

all sides to impressions from nature, from books, and from 
human life around him, and an imaginative sympathy which 
makes itself at home and works dramatically in an extraordi- 
nary range of characters : he has also a wonderful mastery of 
the technics of the poetic art, which enables him to give back 
in a fitting form of beauty the subject which his genius has 
taken into itself. No other English poet since the Eliza- 
bethan age has used so many kinds of verse so well. None 
other has shown in his work a sensitiveness to the movements 
of his own time at once so delicate and so broad. To none 
other has it been given to write with undimmed eye and undi- 
minished strength for so long a period of time, and thus to 
translate into poetry so many of the thoughts and feelings of 
the century in which he lived. 

Whether a temperament so receptive, and an art so versa- 
tile, as Tennyson's, are characteristic of the highest order of 
genius, is an open question, which it is not necessary to decide 
nor even to discuss here. Certainly it would be absurd to 
maintain that his success in dealing with all subjects and in 
all forms of verse is equal. His dramas, for instance, do not 
stand in the first rank. His two epics, The Pri?icess and Idylls 
of the King, have serious defects, the one in structure, the 
other in substance. 

But, on the other hand, the broad scope of his poetic inter- 
est and the variety as well as the general fehcity of his art, 
helped to make him the most popular poet of his time and 
race. Tennyson has something for everybody. He is easy 
to read. He has charm. Thus he has found a wide audi- 
ence, and his poetry has not only reflected, but powerfully 
influenced, the movements of his age. The poet whose words 
are quoted is a constant, secret guide of sentiment and con- 
duct. The man who says a thing first may be more original ; 
he who says it best is more potent. The characters which 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

Tennyson embodied in his verse became memorable. The 
ideals which he expressed in music grew more clear and 
beautiful and familiar to the hearts of men, leading them 
insensibly forward. The main current of thought and feeling 
in the Nineteenth Century, at least among the English-speak- 
ing peoples, — the slow, steady, onward current of admiration, 
desire, hope, aspiration, and endeavour, — follows the Hne 
which is traced in the poetry of Tennyson. 

Now it is just this broad scope, this rich variety, this 
complex character of Tennyson's work which make it rep- 
resentative ; and precisely this is what a book of selections 
cannot be expected to show completely. For this, one must 
read all the twenty-six volumes which he pubHshed, — lyrical 
poems, ballads, English idyls, elegiac poems, war- songs, love- 
songs, dramas, poems of art, classical imitations, dramatic 
monologues, patriotic poems, idylls of chivalry, fairy tales, 
character studies, odes, religious meditations, and rhapsodies 
of faith. 

After such a reading it is natural to ask : How much of this 
large body of verse, so representative in its total effect, is per- 
manent in its poetic value ? How much of it, apart from the 
interest which it has for the student of literary history, has a 
direct and intimate charm, a charm which is likely to be last- 
ing, for the simple lover of poetry, the reader who turns to 
verse not chiefly for an increase of knowledge, but for a 
gift of pure pleasure and vital power? How much of it is 
characterized by those qualities which distinguish Tennyson 
at his best, signed, as we may say, not merely with his name 
but with the mark of his individuality as an artist, and so 
entitled to a place in his personal contribution to the art 
of poetry? 

A volume of selections from Tennyson such as I have 
attempted here, must be made along the general lines to which 



INTRODUCTION ' XIX 

these questions point. I do not suppose that it would be 
possible to make a book of this kind which should include 
all that every admirer of Tennyson would like to find in it. 
There are fine passages in the dramas, for instance, which can- 
not well be taken out of their contexts. In choosing a few of 
the connected lyrics which are woven together in the symphony 
of In Memoriam, one feels a sense of regret at the necessity 
of leaving out other lyrics almost as rich in melody and mean- 
ing, almost as essential to the full harmony of the poem. 
The underlying unity, the epical interest, of Idylls of the 
King cannot be shown by giving two of them, even though 
those two be the strongest in substance and the noblest in 
style. 

But after all, making due allowance for the necessary limi- 
tations, the inevitable omissions, which every educated per- 
son understands, I venture to hope that the selections in this 
volume fairly present the material for a study of Tennyson's 
method and manner as a poet, and an appreciation of that 
which is best in the central body of his poetic work. Here, 
if I am not mistaken, the reader will find those of his poems 
which best endure the test of comparison with classic and 
permanent standards. Here, also, is a book of verse which is 
pervaded, as a whole, by a certain real charm of feeling and 
expression, and which may be confidently offered to those 
gentle persons who like to read poetry for its own sake. And 
here, I am quite sure, is a selection from the mass of Ten- 
nyson's writings which includes at least enough of his most 
characteristic work to illustrate the growth of his mind, to 
disclose the development of his art, and to make every 
reader feel the vital and personal qualities which distinguish 
his poetry. 



XX INTRODUCTION 

II 

AN OUTLINE OF TENNYSON'S LIFE 

" Brother of the greatest poets, true to nature, true to art ; 
Lover of Immortal Love, uplifter of the human heart ! 
Who shall cheer us with high music, who shall sing if thou depart ? " 

In Lucem Transitus, 1S92. 

Parentage and Birth. — Alfred Tennyson was born on the 
6th of August, 1809, at Somersby, a Httle village in Lincoln- 
shire. He was the fourth child in a family of twelve, eight 
boys and four girls, all of whom but two lived to pass the Hmit 
of three score years and ten. The stock was a strong one, 
probably of Danish origin, but with a mingled strain of Norman 
blood through the old family of d'Eyncourt, both branches of 
which, according to Burke's Peerage, are represented by the 
Tennysons. 

The poet's father, the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, 
was rector of Somersby and Wood Enderby. His wife, Eliza- 
beth Fytche, was the daughter of the vicar of Louth, a neigh- 
bouring town. Dr. Tennyson was the eldest son of a lawyer 
of considerable wealth, but was disinherited, by some caprice 
of his father, in favour of a younger brother. The rector of 
Somersby was a man of large frame, vigourous mind, and vari- 
able temper. He had considerable learning, of a broad kind, 
and his scholarship, if not profound, was practical, for he 
taught his sons the best of what they knew before they 
entered the university. A great lover of music and architec- 
ture, fond of writing verse, genial and brilliant in social inter- 
course, excitable, warm-hearted, stern in discipline, generous 
in sympathy, he was a personality of overflowing power ; but at 
times he was subject to fits of profound depression and gloom, 
in which the memory of his father's unkindness darkened 



INTRODUCTION XXI 

his mind, and he seemed almost to lose himself in bitter and 
despondent moods. Mrs. Tennyson was a gentle, loving, happy 
character, by no means lacking in strength, but excelling in 
tenderness, ardent in feeling, vivid in imagination, fervent in 
faith. It is said that " the wicked inhabitants of a neighbour- 
ing village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat 
them, in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or 
to make advantageous bargains by selling her the worthless 
curs." Her son Alfred drew her portrait lovingly in the poem 
called " Isabel " (p. 48) and in the closing Hnes of The Princess 

(p. 184): — 

Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 
No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt 
In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise, 
Interpreter between the gods and men, 
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet 
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere 
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce 
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved, 
And girdled her with music. 

The poet's reverent and loyal love for his father is expressed 
in the lines "To J. S." Both parents saw in their child the 
promise of genius, and hoped great things from him. 

The Imitative Impulse. — The boy grew up, if not precisely 
in Milton's "quiet and still air of delightful studies," yet in an 
atmosphere that was full of stimulus for the imagination and 
favourable to the unfolding of lively powers of thought and 
feeling. It was an obscure hamlet of less than a hundred 
inhabitants where the Tennysons resided, but it was a full home 
in which they lived, — full of children, full of books, full of 
music, full of fanciful games and pastimes, full of human inter- 
ests, full of life. The scenery about Somersby is friendly 
and consoling ; gray hills softly sloping against the sky ; 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

wide-branching elms, trembling poplars, and drooping ash- 
trees ; rich gardens, close-embowered, full of traiUng roses, 
crowned liUes, and purple-spiked lavender; long ridges of 
pasture land where the thick-fleeced sheep are herded ; clear 
brooks purling over ribbed sand and golden gravel, with many 
a curve and turn ; broad horizons, low-hung clouds, mellow 
sunlight ; birds a plenty, flowers profuse. All these sweet forms 
Nature printed on the boy's mind. Every summer brought a 
strong contrast, when the family went to spend their holiday in 
a cottage close beside the sea, on the coast of Lincolnshire, 
among the tussocked ridges of the sand-dunes, looking out 

upon 

The hollow ocean-ridges, roaring into cataracts. 

The boy had an intense passion for the sea, and learned to 
know all its moods and aspects. "Somehow," he said, later 
in life, "water is the element I love best of all the four." 

When he was seven years old he was sent to the house of 
his grandmother at Louth, to attend the grammar-school. But 
it was a hard school with a rough master, and the boy hated it. 
After three years he came home to continue his studies under 
his father. 

His closest comrade in the home was his brother Charles, 
a year older than himself. (See I?i Mejuoriam, Ixxix, and 
"Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets," p. 310.) The 
two lads had many tastes in common, especially their love of 
poetry. They read widely, and offered the sincerest tribute of 
admiration to their favourite bards. Alfred's first attempt at 
writing verse was made when he was eight years old. He 
covered two sides of a slate with Hnes in praise of flowers, in 
imitation of Thomson, the only poet whom he then knew. A 
Httle later Pope's Iliad fascinated him, and he produced many 
hundreds of lines in the same style and metre. At twelve 
he took Scott for his model, and turned out an epic of six 



INTRODUCTION xxili 

thousand lines. Then Byron became his idol. He wrote 
lyrics full of gloom and grief, a romantic drama in blank verse, 
and imitations of the Hebrew Melodies. 

Some of the fruitage of these young labours may be seen in 
the volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers^ which was pub- 
lished anonymously by Charles and Alfred Tennyson, at Louth, 
in 1827, and republished in 1893, with an effort to assign the 
pieces to their respective authors, by the poet's son, the present 
Lord Tennyson. The motto on the title-page of the plump, 
modest little volume is from Martial : Hcec nos fiovimiis esse 
nihil. It is because of this knowledge that the book has value 
as a document in the history of Tennyson's development. It 
shows a receptive mind, a quick, immature fancy, and consid- 
erable fluency and variety in the use of metre. It marks a 
distinct stage of his growth, — the period when his strongest 
poetic impulse was imitative. 

The -Esthetic Impulse. — In 1828 Tennyson, with his brother 
Charles, entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Almost from the 
beginning he was a marked man in the undergraduate world. 
His personal appearance was striking. Tall, large-limbed, deep- 
chested ; with a noble head and abundance of dark, wavy hair ; 
large, brown eyes, dreamy, yet bright ; swarthy complexion 
("almost like a gypsy," said Mrs. Carlyle) ; and a profile like 
a face on a Roman coin ; he gave the immediate impression 
of rare gifts and power in reserve. " I remember him well," 
wrote Edward Fitzgerald, " a sort of Hyperion." His natural 
shyness and habits of soHtude kept him from making many 
acquaintances, but his friends were among the best and most 
brilliant men in the University : Richard Monckton Milnes, 
Richard Chenevix Trench, W. H. Brookfield, John Mitchell 
Kemble, James Spedding, Henry Alford, Charles Buller, Charles 
Merivale, W. H. Thompson, and most intimate of all, Arthur 
Henry Hallam. This was an extraordinary circle of youths ; 



XXIV INTRODUCTION 

distinguished for scholarship, wit, eloquence, freedom of 
thought ; promising great things, which most of them achieved. 
Among these men Tennyson's strength of mind and character 
was recognized, but most of all they were proud of him as a 
coming poet. In their college rooms, with an applauding 
audience around him, he would chant, in his deep, sonorous 
voice, such early poems as "The Hesperides," "Oriana," 
"The Lover's Tale." 

He did not neglect his studies, the classics, history, and the 
natural sciences; but his general reading meant more to him. 
He was a member of an inner circle called the "Apostles," a 
society devoted to ' religion and radicahsm.' (See In Memo- 
rianty Ixxxvii.) The new spirit, represented in literature 
by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, took possession of 
him. He went back to the Elizabethan age, to Milton's early 
poems, as the fountain-heads of Enghsh lyrical poetry. Not 
now as an imitator, but as a kindred artist, he gave himself 
to the search for beauty, freedom, delicate truth to nature, 
romantic charm. 

His poem of " Timbuctoo," which won the Chancellor's 
gold medal in 1829, was only a working-over of an earlier 
poem on "The Battle of Armageddon," and he thought Httle 
of it. But in 1830 he published a slender volume entitled 
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which shows the quaUty of his work in 
this period when the aesthetic impulse was dominant in him. 
Ten of these poems are among the selections in this book. 
They are marked by freshness of fancy, melody of metre, vivid 
descriptive touches, and above all by what Arthur Hallam, in 
his thoughtful review of the volume, called " a strange earnest- 
ness in his worship of beauty." 

In the summer of 1830, Hallam and Tennyson made a 
journey together to the Pyrenees, to carry some funds which 
had been raised in England to the Spanish insurgents who 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

were fighting for liberty. Tennyson was not in sympathy with 
the conservatism which then, as in Wordsworth's day, made 
Cambridge seem narrow and dry and heartless to men of free 
and ardent spirit. In 1831 the illness and death of his father 
made it necessary for him to leave college and go home to 
live with the family at Somersby, where he remained for six 
years. In 1832 he published his second volmiie of Foems, 
dated 1833. 

The tone and quality of this volume are the same that we 
find in its predecessor, but the manner is firmer, stronger, more 
assured. There is also a warmer human interest in such poems 
as "The Miller's Daughter" and "The May Queen " ; and in 
"The Palace of Art" there is a distinct intimation that the 
purely aesthetic period of his poetic development is nearly at an 
end. Six of these poems are among the selections in this book. 

The criticism which these two volumes received, outside 
of the small circle of Tennyson's friends and admirers, was 
severe and scornful. Blackwood's Magazine called the poet 
the pet of a Cockney coterie, and said that some of his lyrics 
were " dismal drivel." The Qtmrterly Review sneered at him 
as " another and a brighter star of that galaxy or milky ivay 
of poetry, of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger." 
Tennyson felt this contemptuous treatment deeply. It seemed 
to him that the Enghsh people would never like his work. 
His aesthetic period closed in gloom and discouragement. 

The Religious and Personal Impulse. — But far heavier than 
any Hterary disappointment was the blow that fell in 1833 
when his dearest friend, Arthur Hallam, to whom his sister 
Emilia was promised in marriage, died suddenly in Vienna. 
This great loss, coming to Tennyson at a time when the first 
joy of youth was already overcast by clouds of loneliness and 
despondency, was the wind of destiny that drove him from the 
pleasant harbourof dreams out upon the wide, strange, uncharted 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

sea of spiritual strife and sorrow, — the sea which seems so bitter 
and so wild, but on whose farther shore those who bravely make 
the voyage find freedom and security and peace and the gen- 
erous joy of a larger, nobler life. The problems of doubt and 
faith which had been worked out with abstract arguments and 
fine theories in the Apostles' Society at Cambridge, now became 
personal problems for Tennyson. He must face them and find 
some answer, if his life was to have a deep and enduring har- 
mony in it, — a harmony in which the discords of fear and 
self-will and despair would dissolve. The true answer, he felt 
sure, could never be found in selfish isolation. The very inten- 
sity of his grief purified it as by fire, made it more humane, 
more sympathetic. His conflict with " the spectres of the 
mind " was not for himself alone, but for others who must 
wrestle as he did, with sorrow and doubt and death. The 
deep significance, the poignant verity, the visionary mystery 
of human existence in all its varied forms, pressed upon him. 
Like the Lady of Shalott in his own ballad, he turned from the 
lucid mirror of fantasy, the magic web of art, to the real w^orld 
of living joy and grief. But it was not a curse, like that which 
followed her departure from her cloistered tower, that came 
upon the poet, drawn and driven from the tranquil, shadowy 
region of exquisite melodies and beautiful pictures. It was a 
blessing, — the blessing of clearer, stronger thought, deeper, 
broader feeling, more power to understand the world and more 
energy to move it. 

Tennyson's personal sorrow for the loss of Hallam is 
expressed in the two lyrics " Break, break, break " and " In 
the Valley of Cauteretz" (p. 274), poems which should always 
be read together as the cry of grief and the answer of consola- 
tion. His long spiritual struggle with the questions of despair 
and hope, of duty and destiny, which were brought home to 
him by the loss of his friend, is recorded in Li Memoriam. 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

The poem was begun at Somersby in 1833 and continued at 
different places and times, as the interwoven lyrics show, for 
nearly sixteen years. Though the greater part of it was 
written by 1842, it was not published until 1850. Mr. Glad- 
stone thought it " the richest oblation ever offered by the 
affection of friendship at the tomb of the departed." It is 
that and something more : it is the great English classic 
on the love of immortality and the immortahty of love. 
Tennyson said, " It was meant to be a kind of Divi?ia Corn- 
media, ending with happiness." The central thought of the 

poem is 

'T is better to have loved and lost 

Than never to have loved at all. 

Wherein it is better now, and why the poet trusts it will be 
better still in the long future, — this is the vital question which 
the poem answers in music. 

But apart from these lyrics of personal grief, and this rich, 
monumental elegy, there are other poems of Tennyson, written 
between 1833 and 1842, which show the extraordinary deep- 
ening and strengthening of his mind during this period of 
inward crisis. For ten years he published no book. Living 
with his mother and sisters at Somersby, at High Beech in 
Epping Forest, at Tunbridge Wells, at Boxley near Maidstone ; 
caring for the family, as the eldest son at home, and skilfully 
managing the narrow means on which they had to live ; wan- 
dering through the country on long walking tours ; visiting his 
friends in London now and then ; falling in love finally and 
forever with Miss Emily Sellwood, to whom he became engaged 
in 1836, but whom he could not marry yet for want of money; 
he held fast to his vocation, and though he sometimes doubted 
whether the world would give him a hearing, he never wavered 
in his conviction that his mission in life was to be a poet. 
The years of silence were not years of idleness. Here is 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

a memorandum of a week's work: ''Mofiday, History, Ger- 
man. Tuesday^ Chemistry, German. Wednesday, Botany, 
German. Thursday, Electricity, German. Friday, Animal 
Physiology, German. Saturday, Mechanics. Sunday, Theol- 
ogy. Next week, Italian in the afternoon. Third week, Greek. 
Eveiwigs, Poetry." Hundreds of hues were composed and 
never written ; hundreds more were written and burned. So 
far from being "■ an artist long before he was a poet," as Mr. R. 
H. Hutton somewhat vacuously says in his essay on Tennyson, 
he toiled terribly to make himself an artist, because he knew 
he was a poet. The results of this toil, in the revision of 
those of his early poems which he thought worthy to survive, 
and in the new poems which he was ready to pubHsh, were 
given to the world in the two volumes of 1842. 

The changes in the early poems were all in the direction 
of clearness, simplicity, a stronger human interest. The new 
poems included "The Vision of Sin," ''The Two Voices," 
"Ulysses," " Morte d'Arthur," the conclusion of "The May 
Queen," "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," "Dora," "The Gar- 
dener's Daughter," " Locksley Hall," " St. Agnes' Eve," "Sir 
Galahad." With the appearance of these two volumes, Tenny- 
son began to be a popular poet. But he did not lose his hold 
upon the elect, the 'fit audience, though few.' The Quarterly 
Review, The West?ninster Review, Dickens, Landor, Rogers, 
Carlyle, Edward Fitzgerald, Aubrey de Vere, and such men in 
England, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, and Poe in America, 
recognized the charm and. the power of his verse. In 1845 
Wordsworth wrote to Henry Reed of Philadelphia, "Tennyson 
is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live 
to give the world still better things." 

Such was the liberating and ennobling effect of the deeper 
personal and spiritual impulse which came into his poetry with 
the experience of sorrow and inward conflict. 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

The Social Impulse. — From 1842 onward we find the poet, 
now better known to the world, coming into wider and closer 
contact with the general life of men. Not that he ever lost 
the unconventional freedom of his dress and manner, the inde- 
pendence of his thought and taste, the singular frankness, 
almost brusquerie of his talk, which was like thinking aloud. 
He never became what is called, oddly enough, a " society 
man." He was incapable of roaring gently at afternoon teas 
or Hterary menageries. He was unwiUing to join himself to 
any party in politics, as Dryden and Swift and Addison, or 
even as Southey and Wordsworth, had done. But he had 
a sincere love for genuine human intercourse, in which real 
thoughts and feelings are uttered by real people who have 
something to say to one another ; a vivid sense of the humour- 
ous aspects of life (shown in such poems as the two versions of 
the "Northern Farmer," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," "The 
Church- Warden ") ; and a broad interest in the vital questions 
and the popular movements of his time. If I am not mis- 
taken, this period when his poetry began to make a wider 
appeal to the people is marked by the presence of a new 
impulse in his work. We may call it, for the sake of a name, 
the social impulse, meaning thereby that the poet now looks 
more often at his work in its relation to the general current 
of human affairs and turns to themes which have a place in 
public attention. 

There was also at this time an attempt on Tennyson's part 
to engage in business, which turned out to be a disastrous 
mistake. He was induced to go into an enterprise for the 
carving of wood by machinery. Into this he put all of his 
capital ; and some of the small patrimony of his brothers and 
sisters was embarked in the same doubtful craft. In 1843 
the ship went down with all its lading, and the Tennysons 
found themselves on the coast of actual poverty. To add- to 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

this misfortune, the poet's health gave way completely, and he 
was forced to spend a long time in a water-cure establishment, 
under treatment for hypochondria. 

In 1846 the grant of a pension of ;^200 from the Civil List, 
on the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, cordially approved 
by the Queen, relieved the pressure of pecuniary need under 
which Tennyson had been left by the failure of his venture in 
wood. In 1847 he published, perhaps in answer to the demand 
for a longer and more sustained poem, The Princess ; A Medley. 
It is an epic, complete enough in structure, but in substance 
half serious and half burlesque. It tells the story of a king's 
daughter who was fired with the ambition to emancipate (and 
even to separate) her sex from man, by founding a woman's 
college extraordinary. This design is crossed by the efforts of 
an amourous, chivalrous, faintly ridiculous prince, who courts 
her under difficulties and wins her through the pity that over- 
comes her when she sees him wounded almost to death by her 
brother. The central theme of the poem is the question of the 
higher education of women, but the style moves so obliquely 
in its mock heroics that it is hard to tell whether the argument 
is for or against. The diction is marked by Tennyson's two 
most frequent faults, over-decoration, and indirectness of utter- 
ance. It is much admired by girls at boarding-school, but the 
woman's college of the present day does not regard its academic 
programme with favour. The poem rises at the close to a very 
sincere and splendid eloquence in praise of true womanhood 
(see p. 182). The intercalary songs, which were added in 
1850, include two or three of Tennyson's best lyrics. They 
shine like jewels in a setting which is not all of pure gold. 

In 1850 there were three important events in the poet's life : 
his marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood ; the publication of the 
long-laboured In Memoriam ; and his appointment as Poet- 
Laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, who had just died. The 



INTRODUCTION xxxi 

three events were closely connected. It was the ^£^300 
received in advance for Iti Memoriam that provided a finan- 
cial basis for the marriage ; and it was the profound admira- 
tion of the Prince Consort for this poem that determined the 
choice of Tennyson for the Laureateship. 

The marriage was in every sense happy. The poet's wife 
was not only of a nature most tender and beautiful ; she was 
also a wise counsellor, a steadfast comrade, as he wrote of 
her, — 

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, 

And a fancy as summer-new 

As the green of the bracken amid the glow of the heather. 

Their first home was made at Twickenham, and here their 
oldest and only surviving son, Hallam, was born. In 1852 the 
" Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington " was published. 
It was received with some disappointment and unfavourable 
criticism as the first production of the Laureate upon an 
important public event. But later and wiser critics generally 
incline to the opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson, who thought 
that the ode had " never been surpassed in any tongue or 
time." ^ 

In 1853, increasing returns from his books (about £,^00 a 
year) made it possible for Tennyson to lease, and ultimately 
to buy, the house and small estate of Farringford, near the vil- 
lage of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. It is a low, rambling, 
unpretentious, gray house, tree-embowered, ivy-mantled, in a 

careless-ordered garden, 
Close to the ridge of a noble down. 

His Other home, Aldworth, near the summit of Black Down in 
Sussex, was not built until 1868. A stateHer mansion, though 
less picturesque, its attraction as a summer home lies in the 

1 Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. I, p. 220. 



xxxii INTRODUCTION 

beauty of its terraced rose-garden, the far-reaching view which 
it commands to the south, and the refreshing purity of the 
upland air that breathes around it. 

In 1854 the famous poem on "The Charge of the Light 
Brigade " was pubHshed in The London Examiner. It was 
included, with the Wellington Ode, in the volume entitled 
Maud, and Other Poems, which appeared in the following year. 
Maud grew out of the dramatic lyric beginning " O that 't were 
possible," in The Ti'ibute, 1837 (p. 167). Sir John Simeon 
said to Tennyson that something more was needed to explain 
the story of the lyric. He then unfolded the central idea in 
a succession of lyrics in which the imaginary hero reveals him- 
self and the tragedy of his life. The sub-title A Monodra}?ia 
was added in 1875. When Tennyson read the poem to me in 
1892, he said, ''It is dramatic, — the story of a man who has 
a touch of inherited insanity, morbid and selfish. The poem 
shows what love has done for him. The war is only an episode." 
This is undoubtedly true and just. Yet the vigour of the long 
invective against the corruptions of a selfish peace, with which 
the poem opens, and the enthusiasm of the patriotic welcome 
to the Crimean war, with which it closes, show something of 
the way in which the poet's mind was working. This volume 
together with The Princess may be taken as an illustration of 
the force of the social impulse which has now entered into 
Tennyson's poetry to cooperate with the aesthetic impulse and 
the religious impulse in the full labours of his maturity. 

Maturity. — Tennyson was now forty-five years old. But 
there still lay before him nearly forty years in which he was to 
bring forth poetry in abundance, a rich, varied, unfailing har- 
vest. It is true that before this wonderful period of maturity 
ended there were signs of age visible in some of his work, — 
a slackening of vigour, an uncertainty of touch, a tendency 
to overload his verse with teaching, a failure to remove the 



INTRODUCTION . xxxiii 

traces of labour from his art, a lack of courage and sureness in 
self-criticism. But it was long before these marks of decline 
were visible, and even then, more than any other English poet 
at an equal age, he kept, and in the hours of happy inspira- 
tion he revealed, the quick emotion, the vivid sensibility, the 
splendid courage of a heart that does not grow gray with 
years. 

In 1859 the first instalment of his most important epic. 
Idylls of the King, appeared. It was followed in 1869, in 
1872, in 1885, by the other parts of the complete poem. In 
1864 Enoch Arden was pubHshed. In 1875 Queen Mary, 
the first of the dramas, came out, followed hy Harold m 1876, 
and The Cup and The Falcofi and Becket in 1884. In 1880 
Ballads, and Other Poems contained some of his best work, 
such as " Rizpah," "The Revenge," "In the Children's Hos- 
pital." In 1885 Tiresias, and Other Poems 2i\^i^^2iXQ.A\ in 1886 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After ; in 1889 De?neter, and Other 
Poems, including " Romney's Remorse," "Vastness," "The 
Progress of Spring," "Merlin and The Gleam," "The Oak," 
" The Throstle," and that supreme lyric which Tennyson wished 
to have printed last in every edition of his collected works, — 
"Crossing the Bar." In 1892 the long list closes with The 
Death of Gi,n07ie, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems. 

The life of the man who was producing, after middle age, 
this great body of poetry, was full, rich, and happy. The one 
sorrow that crossed it was the death of his younger son, Lionel, 
in India, in 1886. Secluded, as ever, from the busyness of the 
world, but in no sense separated from its deeper interests, Ten- 
nyson studied and wrought, delighting in intercourse with his 

friends and in 

converse with all forms 

Of the many-sided mind, 

And those whom passion hath not blinded, 

Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded. 



xxxiv INTRODUCTION 

In 1883 he accepted from the Queen the honour of a peerage 
(a baronetcy had been offered before and refused), and was 
gazetted in the following year as Baron of Aldworth and Far- 
ringford. For himself, he frankly said, the dignity was one 
that he did not desire ; but he felt that he could not let his 
reluctance stand in the way of a tribute from the Throne to 
Literature. When he entered the House of Lords he took 
his seat on the cross-benches, showing that he did not wish 
to bind himself to any party. His first vote was cast for the 
Extension of the Franchise.^ 

At the close of August 1892, when I saw him at Aldworth, 
he was already beginning to feel the warning touches of pain 
which preceded his last illness. But he was still strong and 
mighty in spirit, a noble shape of manhood, massive, large- 
browed, his bronzed face like the countenance of an antique 
seer, his scattered locks scarcely touched with gray. He was 
working on the final proofs of his last volume and planning 
new poems. At table his talk was free, friendly, full of humour 
and common-sense. In the library he read from his poems 
the things which illustrated the subjects of which he had been 
speaking, — passages from Idylls of the King^ some of the 
songs, the " Northern Farmer (New Style) " and, more fully, 
Maud and the WeUington Ode. His voice was deep, rolling, 
resonant. It sank to a note of tenderness, touched with pro- 
phetic solemnity, as he read the last lines of the ode : — 

Speak no more of his renown, 
Lay your earthly fancies clown, 
And in the vast cathedral leave him, 
God accept him, Christ receive him. 

On the 6th of October, 1892, between one and two o'clock 
in the morning, with the splendour of the full moon pouring in 

1 See note, p. 439. 



INTRODUCTION xxxv 

through the windows of the room where his family were watch- 
ing by his bed, he passed into the world of light. His body 
was laid to rest on the 12 th of October, in Westminster Abbey, 
next to the grave of Robert Browning, and close beside the 
monument of Chaucer. The mighty multitude of mourners 
who assembled at the funeral — scholars, statesmen, nobles, 
private soldiers, veterans of the Balaclava Light Brigade, poor 
boys of the " Gordon Home " — told how widely and deeply 
Tennyson had moved the hearts of all sorts and conditions of 
men by his poetry, — which was, in effect, his Hfe. 



Ill 

TENNYSON'S USE OF HIS SOURCES 

Ein Quid am sagi, " Ich bin von keiner S chide I 

Kein Meister lebt mit dem ich buhle ; 

Auch bin ich weit davon entfernt, 

Das ich von Tod ten was gelernty 

Das heissi, wetiji ich ihn recht ver stand ; 

^^ Ich bin ein Narr auf eigne //a«^." Goethe. 

Emerson was of the same opinion as Goethe in regard to 
originality. Writing of Shakespeare he says, '' The greatest 
genius is the most indebted man," and defends the poet's 
right to take his material wherever he can find it. Shakespeare 
certainly exercised large liberty in that respect and did not 
even trouble himself to look for a defence. Wordsworth wrote, 
''^ Miilta tiilit fecitqiie must be the motto of all those who are to 
last." Most of the men whom the world calls great in poetry 
have drawn freely from the sources which are open to all, not 
only in nature, but also in the literature of the past, and in 
the thoughts and feelings of men around them, — the inchoate 
literature of the present. 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION 

From all these sources Tennyson took what he could make 
his own, and used it to enrich his verse. The gold thus 
gathered was not all new-mined ; some of it had passed 
through other hands ; but it was all new-minted, — fused in 
his imagination and fashioned into forms bearing the mark of 
his own genius. My object in the present writing is to give 
some idea of the way in which he collected his material and 
the method by which he wrought it into poetry. 

(i.) With nature Tennyson dealt at first hand. A sensitive, 
patient, joyful observer, he watched the clouds, the waters, 
the trees, the flowers, the birds, for new disclosures of their 
beauty, new suggestions of their symboHc relation to the life 
of man. In a letter written to Mr. Dawson of Montreal, 
commenting upon the statement that certain lines of natural 
description in his work were suggested by something in Words- 
worth or Shelley, he demurs, with perceptible warmth, and 
goes on to say : " There was a period in my life when, as an 
artist. Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, 
etc., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, 
so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or 
more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I 
never put these down, and many and many a line has gone 
away on the north wind, but some remain." Then he gives 
some illustrations, among them, 

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, 

which was suggested by a night at Torquay, when the sky was 
covered with thin vapour. The Une was afterwards embodied 
in TJie Princess^ i, 244. 

But in saying that he never wrote these observations down, 
the poet misremembers his own custom \ for his note-books 
contain many luminous fragments of recorded vision, like the 
following : — 



INTRODUCTION xxxvii 

{Babbicombe.) Like serpent-coils upon the deep. 

(^Bonchurch^ A little salt pool fluttering round a stone upon the 

shore. (" Guinevere," 1. 50.) 
(^The river Shannon^ 071 the rapids^ Ledges of battling water. 
{Corfiwall?) Sea purple and green like a peacock's neck. (See 

<'The Daisy," p. 32.) 
{Voyage to Norway.^ One great wave, green-shining past with 

all its crests smoking high up beside the vessel. 

This last passage is transformed, in " Lancelot and Elaine," 
into a splendid simile : — 

They couch'd their spears and prick'd their steeds, and thus, 

Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made 

In moving, all together down upon him 

Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea, 

Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all 

Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, 

Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, 

And him that helms it, so they overbore 

Sir Lancelot and his charger. 

Tennyson was always fond of travel, and from all his jour- 
neys he brought back jewels which we find embedded here 
and there in his verse. The echoes in "The Bugle Song" 
(p. 9), were heard on the Lakes of Killarney in 1842. The 
Silver Horns of the Alps and the "wTcaths of dangling 
water-smoke," in the "small sweet idyl" from The Princess 
(p. 14), were seen at Lauterbrunnen in 1846. In "O^none" 
(p. 107),— 

My tall dark pines that plumed the craggy ledge 
High over the blue gorge, and all between 
The snowy peak and snow-white cataract, 

were sketched in the Pyrenees in 1830. In the first edition 
of the poem he brought in a beautiful species of cicala, with 
scarlet wings, which he saw on his Spanish journey ; though 



xxxviii INTRODUCTION 

he was conscientious enough to add a footnote explaining that 
" probably nothing of the kind exists in Mount Ida." 

It is true that in later editions he let the cicala and the 
note go ; but this example will serve to illustrate the defect, 
or at least the danger, which attends Tennyson's method of 
working up his pictures. There is a temptation to introduce 
too many details from the -remembered or recorded 'Srough 
sketches," to crowd the canvas, to use bits of description 
which, however beautiful in themselves, do not always add to 
the strength of the picture, and sometimes even give.it an air 
of distracting splendour. Ornateness is a fault from which 
Tennyson is not free. In spite of his careful revision there 
are still some red- winged cicalas left in his verse. There are 
passages in The Princess, in " Enoch Arden," and in some of 
the Idylls of the King, for example, which are bewildering in 
their opulence. 

But on the other hand it must be said that very often this 
richness of detail is precisely the effect which he wishes to 
produce, and in certain poems, like " Recollections of the 
Arabian Nights" (p. 27), "The Lotos-Eaters" (p. 42), and 
"The Palace of Art" (p. 221), it enhances the mystical, 
dream-Hke atmosphere in which the subject is conceived. If 
he sometimes puts in too many touches, he seldom, if ever, 
makes use of any that is not in harmony with the fundamental 
tone, the colour-key of his picture. Notice the accumulation 
of dark images of loneliness and desertion in " Mariana " 
(p. 50), the cold, gray sadness and weariness of the landscape 
in "The Dying Swan" (p. 38), and the serene rapture that 
clothes the earth with emerald and the sea with sapphire in 
the song of triumphant love in Maud, I, xviii (p. 159). 

There are passages in Tennyson's verse where his direct 
vision of nature is illumined by his memory of the things that 
other poets have written when looking at the same scene. 



INTRODUCTION xxxix 

Thus "Frater Ave atque Vale" (p. 237) is filled, as it should 
be, with touches from Catullus. But how delicate is the art 
with which they are blended and harmonized, how exquisite 
the shimmer of the argent-leaved orchards which Tennyson 
adds in the last line. 

Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio ! 

In "The Daisy" (a series of pictures from an Italian jour- 
ney made with his wife in 185 1, recalled to the poet's memory 
by finding, between the leaves of a book which he was reading 
in Edinburgh, a daisy plucked on the Spliigen Pass), we find 
literary and historical reminiscences interwoven with descrip- 
tions. At Cogoletto he remembers the young Columbus who 
was born there. On Lake Como, which Virgil praised in the 
Georgics, he recalls 

The rich Virgilian rustic measure 
Of Lari Maxume, all the way. 

At Varenna the story of Queen Theodolind comes back to 
him. There are critics who profess to regard such allusions 
and reminiscences as indicating a lack of originality in a poet. 
But why? Tennyson saw Italy not with the eyes of a peas- 
ant, but with the enlarged and sensitive vision of a scholar. 
The associations of the past entered into his perception of the 
spirit of place. New colours glowed on 

tower, or high hill-convent, seen 
A light amid its olives green ; 

Or olive-hoary cape in ocean ; 
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine, 

because he remembered the great things that had been done 
and suffered in the land through which he was passing. Is 
not the landscape of imagination as real as the landscape 
of optics ? Must a man be ignorant in order to be original ? 



xl INTRODUCTION 

Is true poetry possible only to him who looks at nature with a 
mind as bare as if he had never opened a book? Milton did 
not think so. 

Tennyson's use of nature as the great source of poetic 
images and figures was for the most part immediate and 
direct ; but often his vision was quickened and broadened by 
memories of what the great poets had seen and sung. Yet 
when he borrowed, here and there, a phrase, an epithet, from 
one of them, it was never done blindly or carelessly. He 
always verified his references to nature. The phrase borrowed 
is sure to be a true one, chosen with a dehcate feeling for the 
best, translated with unfailing skill, and enhanced in beauty 
and significance by the setting which he gave to it. 

(2.) For subjects, plots, and illustrations Tennyson turned 
often to the literature of the past. His range of reading, even 
in boyhood, was wide and various, as the notes to Poems by 
Two Brothers show. At the University he was not only a close 
student of the Greek and Latin classics, but a diligent reader 
of the English poets and philosophers, and a fair Italian 
scholar. In the years after he left college we find him study- 
ing Spanish and German. In later life he kept up his studies 
with undiminished ardour. In 1854 he was learning Persian, 
translating Homer and Virgil to his wife, and reading Dante 
with her. In 1867 he was working over Job, The Song of 
Solomon and Genesis, in Hebrew. He takes the themes of 
"The Lotos-Eaters" and ''The Sea-Fairies" from Homer; 
''The Death of CEnone" from Quintus Calaber; "Tiresias" 
from Euripides; " Tithonus " from an Homeric Hymn; 
"Demeter" and "CEnone" from Ovid; "Lucretius" from 
St. Jerome; "St. Simeon Stylites " and "St. Telemachus " 
from Theodoret ; " The Cup " from Plutarch ; " A Dream of 
Fair Women " from Chaucer ; " Mariana" from Shakespeare ; 
"The Lover's 'J ale" and "The Falcon" from Boccaccio; 



INTRODUCTION xli 

"Ulysses" from Dante; "The Revenge" from Sir Walter 
Raleigh; "The Brook" from Goethe; "The A^oyage of 
Maeldune " from Joyce's Old Celtic Romances; " Akbar's 
Dream " from the Persian, and " Locksley Hall " from the 
Arabic; " Romney's Remorse" from Hayden's Z^/"^ of Ro7n- 
7iey ; "Columbus" from Washington Irving. In the Idylls 
of the King he has drawn upon Sir Thomas Malory, the 
Mabinogiofi of Lady Charlotte Guest, and the old French 
romances. His allusions and references to the Bible are 
many and beautiful. (See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 245 
and Appendix.) But he never wrote a whole poem upon a 
scriptural subject, except a couple of Byronic imitations in 
Poems by Two Brothers. 

To understand his method of using a subject taken from 
literature it may be well to study a few examples. 

The germ of " Ulysses " (p. 116) is found in the following 
passage from Dante's Liferno, xxvi, 90-129, where, in the 
eighth Bolgia Ulysses addresses the two poets : — 

" When I escaped 
From Circe, who beyond a circUng year 
Had held me near Caieta by her charms, 
Ere thus ^neas yet had named the shore ; 
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence 
Of my old father, nor return of love. 
That should have crown'd Penelope with joy, 
Could overcome in me the zeal I had 
To explore the world, and search the ways of life, 
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd 
Into the deep illimitable main, 
With but one bark, and the small faithful band 
That yet cleaved to me. As Iberia far, 
Far as Marocco, either shore I saw, 
And the Sardinian and each isle beside 
Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age 
Were I and my companions, when we came 



xlii INTRODUCTION 

To the strait pass, where Hercules ordain'd 

The boundaries not be overstepp'd by man. 

The walls of Seville to my right I left, 

On the other hand already Ceuta passed. 

' Oh brothers ! ' I began, ' who to the west 

Through perils without number now have reach'd; 

To this the short remaining watch, that yet 

Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof 

Of the unpeopled world, following the track 

Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang. 

Ye were not form'd to live the life of brutes. 

But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.' 

"With these few words I sharpen'd for the voyage 

The mind of my associates, that I then 

Could scarcely have withheld them. To the dawn 

Our poop we tum'd, and for the wutless flight 

Made our oars wings, still gaining on the left. 

Each star of the other pole night now beheld. 

And ours so low, that, from the ocean floor 

It rose not." ^ , , . , „ z^ 

Cary s translation (iSoo). 

The central motive of the poem is undoubtedly contained in 
this passage : the ardent longing for action, for experience, for 
brave adventure, persisting in Ulysses to the very end of life. 
This Tennyson renders in his poem with absolute fidelity. But 
he departs from the original in several points. First, he makes 
the poem a dramatic monologue, or character-piece, spoken 
by Ulysses at Ithaca to his old companions. Second, he 
intensifies the dramatic contrast between the quiet, narrow 
existence on the island (11. 1-5 ; 33-43) and the free, joyous, 
perilous life for which Ulysses longs (11. 11-32). Third, he 
adds glimpses of natural scenery in wonderful harmony with the 
spirit of the poem (11. 2, 44, 45, 54-61). Fourth, he brings 
out with extraordinary vividness the feeling which he tells us 
was in his own heart when he wrote the poem, " the need of 
going forward and braving the struggle of Hfe." 



INTRODUCTION xliii 

Naturally enough many phrases are used which recall classic 
writers. " The rainy Hyades " belong to Virgil. The rowers 
"sitting well in order," to Homer. To "rust unburnish'd " 
(1. 23) is an improved echo from the speech of Shakespeare's 
Ulysses in Tt'oilus and Cressida. All this adds to the vraisem- 
blance of the poem. It is the art by which the poet evokes 
in our minds the associations with which Hterature has sur- 
rounded the figure of Ulysses, a distinct personality, an endur- 
ing type in the world of imagination. The proof of the poet's 
strength lies in his ability to meet the test of comparison 
between his own work and that classic background of which 
his allusions frankly remind us, and in his power to add some- 
thing new, vivid, and . individual to the picture which has been 
painted from so many different points of view by the greatest 
artists. This test, it seems to me, Tennyson endures magnifi- 
cently. His Ulysses is not unworthy to rank with the wanderer 
of Homer, of Dante, of Shakespeare. No lines of theirs are 
larger than Tennyson's — 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

Nor has any poet embodied " the unconquerable mind of 
man " more nobly than in the final lines of this poem : — 

Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Mov'd earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are ; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

A poem of very different character is " A Dream of Fair 
Women" (p. 53), written when the aesthetic impulse was 
strongest in Tennyson. The suggestion came from Chaucer's 



xliv INTRODUCTION 

Legend of Good Women. How full and deep and nobly melan- 
choly are the chords with which Tennyson enriches the dream- 
music to which Chaucer's poem gives the key-note : — 

In every land 
I saw, wherever light illummeth, 
Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand 
The downward slope to death. 

Those far-renowned brides of ancient song 
Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars, 

And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong. 
And trumpets blown for wars. 

Then follows a passage full of fresh and exquisite descriptions 
of nature, the scenery of his dream : — 

Enormous elm-tree-boles did stoop and lean 

Upon the dusky brushwood underneath 
Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green. 

New from its silken sheath. 

I knew the flowers, I knew the leaves, I knew 

The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn 
On those long, rank, dark wood-walks drench'd in dew, 

Leading from lawn to lawn. 

The smell of violets, hidden in the green, 
Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame 

The times when I remember to have been 
Joyful and free from blame. 

This is Tennyson's own manner, recognizable, imitable, but 
not easily equalled. Now come the fair women who people 
his visionary forest. Each one speaks to him and reveals her- 
self by the lyric disclosure of her story. Only in one case — 
that of Rosamond — does the speaker utter her name. In all 
the others, it is by some touch of description made familiar to 
us by " ancient song," that the figure is recognized. Iphigenia 



INTRODUCTION xlv 

tells how she stood before the altar m Auhs, and saw her sorrow- 
ing father, and the waiting ships, and the crowd around her, 
and the knife which was to shed the victim's blood. (Lucretius, 
De Rerum Natura, i. 85 ff.) Cleopatra recalls the nights of 
revelry with Mark Antony (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleo- 
patra^ Act i, sc. iv), his wild love (Act iv, sc. viii), her queenly 
suicide, robed and crowned, with the bite of the aspic on her 
breast (Act v, sc. ii). Jephtha's Daughter repeats the song with 
which she celebrated Israel's victory over Ammon {Judges, xi). 
The dream rounds itself into royal splendour, glittering with 
gems from legend and poetry : then it fades, never to be 

repeated, — ^^ , . , 

How eagerly I sought to strike 

Into that wondrous track of dreams again ! 

But no two dreams are like. 

Yet another type of subject taken from Hterature is found 
in " Dora " (p. loi). Mr. J. Churton Collins says " The whole 
plot ... to the minutest details is taken from a prose story 
of Miss Mitford's. . . . That the poet's indebtedness to the 
novel has not been intimated, is due no doubt to the^ fact that 
Tennyson, like Gray, leaves his commentators to track him to 
his raw material." ^ To understand the carelessness of Mr. 
Collins as a critic it is only necessary to point out the fact 
that the reference to Miss Mitford's story was distinctly given 
in a note to the first edition of the poem in 1842. But to 
appreciate fully the bold inaccuracy of his general statement 
one needs to read the pastoral of " Dora Creswell," in Our Vil- 
lage, side by side with Tennyson's " Dora." In Miss Mitford's 
story Dora is a Httle girl ; in Tennyson's poem she is a young 
woman. Miss Mitford tells nothing of the conflict between 
the old farmer and his son about the proposed marriage with 
Dora ; Tennyson makes it prominent in the working out of 

1 J. Churton Collins, Illustrations of Tennyson. Chatto and Windus, 1891. 



xlvi INTRODUCTION 

the plot. Miss Mitford makes the son marry the dehcate 
daughter of a school-mistress; but in Tennyson's poem his 
choice falls on Mary Morrison, a labourer's daughter, and, as 
the poem implies, a vigourous, healthy, independent girl. In 
Miss Mitford's story there is no trace of Dora's expulsion from 
the old farmer's house after she has succeeded, by a stratagem, 
in making him receive his little grandson, Mary's child ; but 
Tennyson makes this the turning point of the most pathetic 
part of his poem, — Dora's winning of Mary's love, and their 
resolve that they will Hve together and bring up the child free 
from the influence of the old farmer's hardness. When the old 
man at last gives way, and takes Mary and Dora and the child 
home, Tennyson adds the final touch of insight to the little 

drama : — 

So those four abode 
Within one house together ; and as years 
Went forward Mary took another mate ; 
But Dora lived imtnarried till her death. 

The entire poem is written in the simplest language. It 
does hot contain a single simile, nor a word used in an unfa- 
miliar sense. Wordsworth said, " Mr. Tennyson, I have been 
endeavouring all my life to write a pastoral hke your ' Dora,' 
and have not succeeded." The contrast between the prose 
story with its abundance of pretty details, and the poem in 
beauty unadorned, illustrates the difference between neat work 
and fine work. 

The vivifying power of Tennyson's imagination is nowhere 
shown more clearly than in the great use which he makes 
of comparatively small hints and phrases from other writers. 
In his hands they seem to expand. They are lifted up, 
animated, ennobled. 

A good illustration of this kind of work may be seen in the 
way in which he handles the material taken from Sir Thomas 



INTRODUCTION xlvii 

Malory in the Morte d\4rthtir. In Malory the King's rebuke 
to the unfaithful knight runs thus : "Ah, traitor untrue, now 
hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, 
thou that hast been to me so lief and dear? And thou art 
named a noble knight, and would betray me for the richness 
of the sword ! " In Tennyson a new dramatic splendour 
enters into the reproach : — 

' Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, 

Unknightly, traitor-hearted I Woe is me I 

Authority forgets a dying king. 

Laid widow'd of the power in his eye 

That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, 

For thou, the latest-left of all my knights. 

In whom should meet the offices of all. 

Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt ; 

Either from lust of gold, or like a girl 

Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. 

Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice. 

And the third time may prosper, get thee hence : 

But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, 

I will arise and slay thee w^ith my hands.' 

In Malory the King's parting address, spoken from the barge, 
is : " Comfort thyself, and do as well as thou may'st, for in 
me is no trust for to trust in ; for I will into the vale of 
Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound : and if thou hear 
never more of me pray for my soul." In Tennyson these few 
words become the germ of the great passage beginning 

' The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 

And God fulfils himself in many ways. 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,' — 

and closing with one of the noblest utterances in regard to 
prayer that can be found in the world's literature. 

Malory says, "And as soon as Sir Bedivere had lost the 
sight of the barge, he wept and wailed, and so took the 



xiviu 



INTRODUCTION 



forest." Tennyson makes us see the dark vessel moving 

away : — 

The barge with oar and sail 

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan 

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, 

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood 

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere 

Revolving many memories, till the hull 

Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, 

And on the mere the wailing died away. 

The difference here is between the seed of poetry and the 
flower fully unfolded. 

Instances of the same enlarging and transforming power 
of Tennyson's genius may be noted in "The Revenge." 
Again and again he takes a bare fact given by Sir Walter 
Raleigh, or Froude, and makes it flash a sudden lightning 
or roar a majestic thunder through the smoke of the wild 
sea-fight. (See vi-xi, pp. 88-90.) The whole poem is scrupu- 
lously exact in its fideUty to the historical records, but it 
lifts the story on strong wings into the realm of vivid 
imagination. We do not merely hear about it : we see it, 
we feel it. 

Another illustration is found in ''The Lotos-Eaters," lines 
156-167 (pp. 47, 48). This is expanded from Lucretius, 
De Reriiin Naiiira, iii, 15. "The divinity of the gods is 
revealed, and their tranquil abodes which neither winds do 
shake, nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by 
sharp frosts harms with hoary fall : an ever cloudless ether o'er- 
canopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely round. 
Nature too supplies all their wants and nothing ever impairs 
their peace of mind." But the vivid contrast between this 
luxurious state of dolce far niente and the troubles, toils, and 
conflicts of human Hfe, is added by Tennyson, and gives a new 
significance to the passage. 



INTRODUCTION xlix 

We come now to Tennyson's use of the raw material lying 
close at hand, as yet untouched by the shaping spirit of litera- 
ture, — newspaper stories, speeches, tales of the country-side, 
legends and phrases passing from lip to lip, suggestions from 
conversations and letters. He was quick to see the value of 
things that came to him in this way, and at the same time, as 
a rule, most clear in his discrimination between that which 
was merely interesting or striking, and that which was available 
for the purposes of poetry, and more particularly of such poetry 
as he could write. He did not often make Wordsworth's mis- 
take of choosing themes in themselves trivial like "Alice Fell" 
or " Goody Blake," or themes involving an incongruous and 
ridiculous element, like "Peter Bell" or "The Idiot Boy." 
If the subject was one that had a humourous aspect, he gave 
play to his sense of humour in treating it. If it was serious, 
he handled it in a tragic or in a pathetic way, according to the 
depth of feeling which it naturally involved. Illustrations of 
these different methods may easily be found among his poems. 

The " Northern Farmer (Old Style) " was suggested by a 
story which his great-uncle told him about a Lincolnshire 
farm-bailiff who said, when he was dying, " God A'mighty 
little knows what He's aboot, a-takin' me, an' 'Squire '11 be so 
mad an' all ! " From this saying, Tennyson declares, he con- 
jectured the whole man, depicted as he is with healthy vigour 
and kindly humour. It was the remark of a rich neighbour, 
" When I canters my 'erse along the ramper I 'ears proputty^ 
proputty, propidty,'' that suggested the contrasting character- 
piece, the " Northern Farmer (New Style)." The poem 
called "The Church-Warden and the Curate" was made out 
of a story told to the poet by the Rev. H. D. Rawnsley.^ 
" The Grandmother " was suggested in a letter from Benjamin 

1 Memories of the Tennysons^ by H. D. Rawnsley, MacLehose, Glasgow, 1900, 
pp. 113 ff. 



1 INTRODUCTION 

Jowett giving the saying of an old lady, ''The spirits of my 
children always seem to hover about me." "The Northern 
Cobbler " was founded on a true story which Tennyson heard 
in his youth. " Owd Roa " was the poet's version of a report 
that he had read in a newspaper about a black retriever which 
saved a child from a burning house. To the end of his life he 
kept his familiarity with the Lincolnshire variety of English, 
and delighted to read aloud his verses written in that racy and 
resonant dialect, which is now, unfortunately, rapidly being lost 
in the dull march of improvement. 

Turning from these genre-pieces, we find two of his most 
powerful ballads, one intensely tragic, the other irresistibly 
pathetic, based upon incidents related in contemporary peri- 
odicals. In a penny magazine called O/^ Brighto7i he read a 
story of a young man named Rooke who was hanged in chains 
for robbing the mail, some time near the close of the eighteenth 
century. " When the elements had caused the clothes and flesh 
to decay, his aged mother, night after night, in all weathers, and 
the more tempestuous the weather the more frequent the visits, 
made a sacred pilgrimage to the lonely spot on the Downs, and 
it was noticed that on her return she always brought something 
away with her in her apron. Upon being watched, it was dis- 
covered that the bones of the hanging man were the objects 
of her search, and as the wind and rain scattered them on the 
ground she conveyed them to her home. There she kept them, 
and, when the gibbet was stripped of its horrid burden, in the 
dead silence of the night, she interred them in the hallowed 
enclosure of Old Shoreham Churchyard." This is the tale. 
Imagine what Byron would have made of it, or Shelley, if we 
may judge by the gruesome details of the second part of "The 
Sensitive Plant." But Tennyson goes straight to the heart of 
the passion of motherhood, surviving shame and sorrow, con- 
quering fear and weakness in that withered mother's breast. 



INTRODUCTION li 

She tells her story in a dramatic lyric, a naked song of tragedy, 
a sohtary, trembling war-cry of indomitable love. Against 
this second Rizpah, greater in her heroism than even the 
Hebrew mother whose deeds are told in the Book of Samuel, 
all the forces of law and church and society are arrayed. But 
she will not be balked of her human rights. She will hope 
that somewhere there is mercy for her boy. She will gather 
his bones from shame and lay them to rest in consecrated 
ground. 

Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left — 

I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, will you call it a theft ? — 

My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the bones that had laugh'd 

and had cried — 
Theirs? O no! They are mine — not theirs — they had moved in 

my side. 

" In the Children's Hospital " is a poem as tender as " Riz- 
pah" is passionate. The story was told to Tennyson by Miss 
Mary Gladstone. An outline of it was printed in a parochial 
magazine under the title "Alice's Christmas Day." The theme 
is the faith and courage of a child in the presence of pain 
and death. That the poet at seventy years of age should be 
able to enter so simply, so sincerely, so profoundly into the 
sweet secret of a suffering child's heart, is a marvellous thing. 
After all, there must be something moral and spiritual in true 
poetic genius. It is not mere intellectual power. It is tem- 
perament, it is sympathy, it is that power to put oneself in 
another's place, which lies so close to the root of the Golden 
Rule. 



lii INTRODUCTION 

IV 

TENNYSON'S REVISION OF HIS TEXT 

Vos, 
Pompiluis sanguis, carmen reprehendite, quod non 
Multa dies et miilta litura coercuit, atque 
Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguent. 

Horace : Dc Arte Poetica, 291-294. 

The changes which a poet makes, from time to time, in the 
text of his poends may be taken in part as a measure of his 
power of self-criticism, and in part as a record of the growth 
of his mind. It is true, of course, that a man may prefer to 
put his new ideas ahogether into new poems and leave the 
old ones untouched ; true also that the creative impulse may 
be so much stronger than the critical as to make him impatient 
of the limce labor et mo7'a. This was the case with Robert 
Browning. There was a time when he made a point of turning 
out a new poem every day. When reproached for indifference 
to form he said that " the world must take him as it found him." 

But Tennyson was a constant, careful corrector of his own 
verse. He held that "An artist should get his workmanship 
as good as he can, and make his work as perfect as possible. 
A small vessel, built on fine lines, is likely to float further 
down the stream of time than a big raft." He was keenly 
sensitive to the subtle effects of rhythm, the associations of 
words, the beauty of form. The deepening of thought and 
feeling which came to him with the experience of life did not 
make him indifferent to the technics of his craft as a poet. 
Indeed it seemed to intensify his desire for perfection. The 
more he had to say the more carefully he wished to say it. 

The first and most important revision of his work began in 
the period of his greatest spiritual and intellectual growth, 



INTRODUCTION liii 

immediately after the death of his friend Hallam. The results 
of it were seen in the early poems, repubHshed in the two 
volumes of 1842. From this time forward there were many 
changes in the successive editions of his poems. The Princess, 
published in 1847, was slightly altered in 1848, thoroughly 
revised in 1850 (when the intercalary songs were added), and 
considerably enlarged in 1851. The "Ode on the Death of 
the Duke of Wellington," printed as a pamphlet in 1852, was 
immediately revised in 1853, and again much altered when it 
appeared in the same volume with Maud in 1855. As late as 
August 1892, I heard Tennyson questioning whether the line 
describing the cross of St. Paul's — 

That shines over city and river — 

should be changed to read, 

That shines upon city and river. 

There were general revisions in 1872 (The Library F^dition), 
in 1874 (The Cabinet Edition), in 1884 (The Globe Edition), 
in 1886 (A New Library Edition, in ten volumes), in 1889, 
and in 1891. The complete single-volume edition, "with last 
alterations," was pubHshed in 1894. 

In Memoriavi received less revision after its first publication 
than any other of Tennyson's larger poems ; ^ probably because 
it had been so frequently worked over in manuscript. Sixteen 
years passed between its inception and its appearance in print. 

I propose to examine some of Tennyson's changes in his 
text in order that we may do what none of the critics have 
yet done, — get a clear idea of their general character and the 
particular reasons why he made them. These changes may be 
classified under five heads, descriptive of the different reasons 
for revision. 

1 Joseph Jacobs, Tennyson and hi Memoriam, notes 62 verbal changes. 
Two sections (xxxix, Ux) have been added to the poem. 



liv ' INTRODUCTION 

I . For si?nplicity and naturalness. — There was a tincture 
of archaism in the early diction of Tennyson, an occasional 
use of far-fetched words, an unfamiliar way of spelling, a general 
flavour of conscious exquisiteness, which seemed to his maturer 
judgment to savour of affectation. These blemishes, due to 
the predominance of the aesthetic impulse, he was careful 
to remove. 

At first, he tells us, he had " an absurd antipathy " to the use 
of the hyphen; and in 1830 and 1832 he wrote, in ''^dj\- 
d>x\2i^'\flowerplots^ casementciirtain^ 7narishmosses, silvergreen ; 
and in " The Palace of Art," pleasiirehouse^ simnywarm, 
forrentbow, dearwalled. In 1842 the despised hyphen was 
restored to its place, and the compound words were spelled 
according to common usage. He discarded also his early 
fashion of accenting the ed in the past participle, — wreathed^ 
blenched^ gleaned^ etc. 

Archaic elisions, like " throne o' the massive ore " in 
" Recollections of the Arabian Nights " (1. 146), and " up an' 
away" in *' Mariana " (1. 50), and "whither away wi' the 
singing sail" in " The Sea-Fairies," were eliminated. 

A purified and chastened taste made him prefer, in the 
" Ode to Memory," 

With plaited alleys of the trailing rose — 

[1842] 
to 

With pleached alleys of the trailing rose. 

[1830] 

In "The Lady of Shalott " he left out some of the more 
fanciful bits of dress and decoration with which the poem was 
at first a little overloaded ; for example : — 

A pearlgarland winds her head : 
She leaneth on a velvet bed, 
Full royally apparelled. 



INTRODUCTION Iv 

In " Mariana " he substituted 

The day 
Was sloping toward his western bower, 

for 

The day 

Downsloped was westering in his bower. 

[1830] 

The general result of such alterations as these was to make 
the poems more simple and straightforward. In the same 
way we feel that there is great gain in the omission of the 
stanzas about a balloon which were originally prefixed to *' A 
Dream of Fair Women," and of the elaborate architectural 
and decorative details which overloaded the first version of 
"The Palace of Art," and in the compression of the last 
strophe of "The Lotos-Eaters," with its curious pictures of 
' the tusked seahorse wallowing in a stripe of grassgreen calm,' 
and ' the monstrous narwhale swallowing his own foamfountains 
in the sea.' We can well spare these marine prodigies for the 
sake of such a line as 

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free. 

[1842] 

2. For melody afid smoothness. — It was a constant wish of 
Tennyson to make his verse easy to read, as musical as pos- 
sible, except when the sense required a rough or broken 
rhythm. He had a strong aversion to the hissing sound of the 
letter s when it comes at the end of a word and at the begin- 
ning of the next word. He was always trying to get rid of 
this, — " kicking the geese out of the boat," as he called it, — 
and he thought that he had succeeded. (^Memoir, II, p. 14.) 
But this, of course, was a " flattering unction." It is not dififi- 
cult to find instances of the double sibilant remaining in his 
verse : for example in " A Dream of Fair Women " (1. 241) : — 

She lock'd her lips : she left me where I stood. 



Ivi INTRODUCTION 

and " Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere " (1. 23) : — 

She seem'd a part of joyous Spring. 

But for the most part he was careful to remove it, as in the 
following cases. 

" The Lady of Shalott " (1. 156) : — 



A pale, pale corpse she floated by. 
A gleaming shape she floated by. 

" Mariana in the South " (11. 9-10) : — 



[1S33] 

[1842] 



Down in the dry salt-marshes stood 

Tha*: house darklatticed. 

[OmUted, 1S42] 

"Locksley Hall" (1. 182) :— ' 

Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. 

[1842] 

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. 

[1845] 

Alterations were made in order to get rid of unpleasant 
assonance in blank verse, as in "(P^none" (1. 19): — 

She, leaning on a vine-entwined stone. 

^ [1833] 

She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine. 

[1842] 

Disagreeable alliterations ^vere removed, as in ''Mariana" 

(1- 43) ■■ - 

For leagues no other tree did dark. 

For leagues no other tree did mark. 

^ [1842] 

"Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1. 5) : — 

When laurel-garlanded leaders fall. 

Mourning when their leaders fall. 

^ [.855] 



INTRODUCTION Ivii 

Imperfect rhymes were corrected, as in *' Mariana in the 
South" (1. 85) : — 

One dry cicala's summer song 

At night filled all the gallery, 
Backward the latticeblind she flung 

And leaned upon the balcony. 

^ [1833] 

At eve a dry cicala sung, 

There came a sound as of the sea ; 
Backward the lattice-blind she flung. 

And lean'd upon the balcony. 

[1842] 

Incongruous and harsh expressions were removed, as in 
"The Poet" (1. 45) : — 

And in the bordure of her robe was writ 

Wisdom, a name to shake 
Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit. 

[1830] 

And in her raiment's hem was traced in flame 

Wisdom, a name to shake 
All evil dreams of power — a sacred name. 

[1842] 

Two very deHcate and perfect examples of the same kind 
of improvement are found in the revision of " Claribel," line 

it: — 

At noon the bee low-hummeth, 



At noon the wild bee hummeth, 
and line 17: — 

The fledgling throstle lispeth. 
The callow throstle lispeth. 



[1830] 
[1842] 

[1830] 
[.842] 



Some of the alterations in the Wellington Ode are very 
happy. Line 79 originally read, 

And ever-ringing avenues of song. 



Iviii INTRODUCTION 

How much more musical is the present version : — 

And ever-echoing avenues of song! 

In Une 133, "world's earthquake" was changed to "world- 
earthquake." Line 267, — 

Hush, the Dead March sounds in the people's ears, — 

[1853] 

was wonderfully deepened in 1855, when it was altered to 
Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears. 

3. For clearness of thought. — The most familiar instance of 
this kind of revision is in "A Dream of Fair Women." In 
1833 the stanza describing the sacrifice of Iphigenia ended 
with the lines 

One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat ; 
Slowly, — and nothing more. 

A critic very properly inquired * what more she would have.' 
The lines were changed to 

The bright death quiver'd at the victim's throat ; 
Touch'd; and I knew no more. 

There is another curious illustration in *' Lady Clara Vere 
de Vere." In 1842 lines 49-52 read, 

Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere, 

From yon blue heavens above us bent 

The gardener Adam and his wife 
Smile at the claims of long descent. 

Line 51 was changed, in 1845, to 

The grand old gardener and his wife, 

which was both weak and ambiguous. One might fancy (as 
a young lady of my acquaintance did) that the poet was 



INTRODUCTION lix 

speaking of some fine old gardener on the De Vere estate, who 
had died and gone to heaven. In 1875 Tennyson restored 
the original and better reading, "The gardener Adam." 

A few more illustrations will suffice to show how careful he 
was to make his meaning clear. 

" Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1. 157) : — 

Of most unbounded reverence and regret. ^ ^ ^ 

[1852] 

But it is hard to see how anything can be more or less 

unbounded ; so the line was changed : 

Of boundless reverence and regret. 

^ [1853! 

Of boundless love and reverence and regret. ^ 

[1855] 

"The Marriage of Geraint" (1. 70) : — 
They sleeping each by other. 
They sleeping each by either. 

"Lancelot and Elaine" (1. 45) : — 

And one of these, the king, had on a cro%vn. 

L1859J 

And he, that once was king, had on a crown. 

[1874] 

(L. 168): — 

Thither he made, and wound the gateway horn. 

[1859] 

Thither he made, and blew the gateway horn. 

[1874] 

(L. 1147):- 

Steerd by the dumb, went upward with the flood. 

[1859] 
Oar\i by the dumb, went upward with the flood. 

[1874] 
" Guinevere" (1. 470) : — 

To honour his own word as if his God's. 



Ix INTRODUCTION 

This line was not in the 1859 version. It enhances the 
solemnity of the oath of initiation into the Round Table. 
"The Passing of Arthur" (11. 462-469) : — 

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb 
Ev'n to the highest he could chmb, and saw, 
Stramhig his eyes beneath an arch of hand, 
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, 
Down that long water opening on the deep 
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go 
From less to less and vanish into light. 
And the new sun rose bringing the new year. 

These lines, with others, were added to " Morte d' Arthur," 
the original form of this idyll, in order to bring out the distant 
gleam of hope which is thrown upon the close of the epic by the 
vision of Arthur's immortaHty and the prophecy of his return. 

4. For truth in the description of Jiature. — The alterations 
made for this reason are very many. I give a few examples. 

"The Lotos-Eaters" (1. 7) : — 

Above the vallev burned the golden moon. 

[1833] 

But in the afternoon (1. 3) the moon is of palest silver ; so 
the line was revised thus : — 

Full-faced above the valley stood the moon. 

[.842] 

Line 16 originally read. 

Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow. 

[-833] 

But, in the first place, it is the lightning, not the thunder, that 
cleaves the mountains ; and, in the second place, a snow-peak, 
if struck by lightning, would not remain "cloven" very long, 
but would soon be covered with snow again. It was doubtless 
for these reasons, quite as much as for the sake of keeping the 



INTRODUCTION Ixi 

quiet and dreamy tone of his picture of Lotos-land, that 
Tennyson changed the line to 

Three silent pinnacles of aged snow. 

Another change of the same kind is found in "The Daisy" 
(11. 35, 36) : - 

And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten 

Of ice, far off' on a mountain head. 

[1855] 

But one would not be so likely to see the ghstening of ice 

at a long distance, as high above one ; so the line was altered 

to read, 

Of ice, far tip on a mountain head. 

In *' Locksley Hall " (1. 3) the first reading was 

'T is the place, and round the gables, as of old, the curlews call. 

[1842] 

But the curlews do not fly close to the roofs of houses, as the 
swallows do; so the line was changed to 

'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call. 

[•845] 
" Mariana" (11. 3, 4) : — 

The rusted nails fell from the knots 

That held the peach to X\\q. gardenwall. 

[1830] 

This was not quite characteristic of a Lincolnshire garden ; so 

it was altered in 1863 and 1872 to the present form : — 

That held the pear to the gable-wall. 

"The Poet's Song" (1. 9) : — 

The swallow stopped as he hunted the bee. 

[1842] 

But swallows do not hunt bees ; so the Hne was changed to 

The swallow stopt as he hunted the fly. 

[1884] 



Ixii INTRODUCTION 

" Lancelot and Elaine" (11. 652, 653) : — 

No surer than our falcon yesterday, 
Who lost the hern we slipt him at. 

[1859] 

But the female falcon, being larger and fiercer, is the 
one usually employed in the chase ; so him was changed 
to her. 

There is a very interesting addition to In Memflria77i, which 
bears witness to Tennyson's scrupulous desire to be truthful in 
natural description. Section ii is addressed to an old yew- 
tree in the graveyard, and contains this stanza : — 

O not for thee the glow, the bloom. 

Who changest not in any gale. 

Nor branding summer suns avail 
To touch thy thousand years of gloom. 

But, as a matter of fact, the yew has its season of bloom ; and 
so in Section xxxix, added in 187 1, we find these lines : — 

To thee too comes the golden hour 
When flower is feeling after flower ; 
But Sorrow, — fixt upon the dead, 

And darkening the dark graves of men, — 
What whisper'd from her lying lips ? 
Thy gloom is kindled at the tips. 

And passes into gloom again. 

5 . For deeper meaning and hiwian interest. — In this respect 
the revision of " The Palace of Art " is most important. The 
stanzas added in the later editions of this poem have the effect 
of intensifying its significance, making the sin of self-centred 
isolation stand out sharply (11. 197-204), displaying the scorn- 
ful contempt of the proud soul for common humanity (11. 145- 
160), and throwing over the picture the Pharisee's robe of 



INTRODUCTION Ixiii 

moral self-complacency (11. 205-208). The introduction in 
1833 began as follows : 

I send you, friend, a sort of allegory, 
(You are an artist and will understand 
Its many lesser meanings). 

But in 1842 the lines read 

I send you here a sort of allegory, 
(For you will understand it). 

The poet no longer addresses his work to an artist : he speaks 
more broadly to man as man. For the same reason he omits a 
great many of the purely decorative stanzas, and concentrates 
the attention on the spiritual drama. 

The addition of the Co?ichisio?i to "The May Queen" 
(1842) is another instance of Tennyson's enrichment of his 
work with warmer human interest. In the first two parts 
there is nothing quite so intimate in knowledge of the heart 
as the lines 

O look ! the sun begins to rise, the heavens are in a glow; 
He shines upon a hundred fields, and all of them I knozu. 

There is nothing quite so true to the simplicity of childlike 
faith as the closing verses : — 

To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast — 
And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. 

The sixth strophe of the Choric Song in " The Lotos- 
Eaters," beginning 

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, 
And dear the last embraces of our wives 
And their warm tears, — 

was added in 1842. 



Ixiv INTRODUCTION 

In the " Ode on the Death of the Duke of VVeUington," lines 
266-270 were added after the first edition : — 

On God and Godlike men we build our trust. 
Hush, the Dead March wails m the people's ears : 
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears: 
The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; 
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

This passage brings a deep note of natural emotion into the 
poem. The physical effect of the actual interment, the sight 
of the yawning grave, the rattle of the handful of earth thrown 
upon the coffin, are vividly expressed. 

A noteworthy change for the sake of expressing a deeper 
human feeling occurs in " The Lady of Shalott." The original 
form of the last stanza was merely picturesque : it described 
the wonder and perplexity of " the wellfed wits at Camelot " 
when they looked upon the dead maiden in her funeral barge 
and read the parchment on her breast : — 

" The web was woven curiously. 
The charm is broken utterly, 
Drazv near and fear 7tot — this is /, 
The Lady of Shalott r 

[1833] 

But the revised version makes them " cross themselves for 
Tear," and brings the knight for secret love of whom the 
maiden died to look upon her face : — 

But Lancelot mused a little space ; 
He said, ' She has a lovely face ; 
God in his mercy lend her grace, 
The Lady of Shalott.' 

The addition of the songs to The Prmcess (1850) must be 
regarded as evidence of a desire to deepen the meaning of 



INTRODUCTION Ixv 

the story. Tennyson said distinctly that he wished to make 
people see that the child was the heroine of the poem. The 
songs are a great help in this direction. In the Idylls of the 
A7;/^^Te£ii^P)n took pains, as he went on with the series, to 
eliminate all traces of the old tradition which made Modred 
the son of King Arthur and his half-sister Bellicent, thus 
sweeping away the taint of incest from the story, and reveal- 
ing the catastrophe as the result of the unlawful love of 
Lancelot and Guinevere. (See The Poetry of Tejtnyson, 
pp. 171 ff.) He introduced many allegorical details into the 
later Idylls. And he endeavoured to enhance the epic dignity 
and significance of the series by inserting the closing passages 
of "The Coming of Arthur" and "The Passing of Arthur," 
which present clearly the idea of a great kingdom rising under 
Arthur's leadership and falling into ruin with his defeat. 

A general study of the changes which Tennyson made in 
the text of his poems will show, beyond a doubt, not only 
that he was sensitive to the imperfections in his work and 
ready to profit, at least to a certain extent, by the suggestions 
of critics ; but also that his skill as an artist was refined by 
use, and that his thoughts of life and his sympathies with man- 
kind deepened and broadened with advancing years. Thus 
there was a compensation for the loss of something of the 
delicate, inimitable freshness, the novel and enchanting charm 
which breathed from the lyrics of his youth. 



Ixvi INTRODUCTION 



THE CLASSIFICATION OF TENNYSON'SJPOEMS 

Tennyson never attempted to arrange his works on any 
such formal scheme as Wordsworth used in classifying his 
poems for the edition of 1815 and followed in all subsequent 
editions. ''Poems," said he, "apparently miscellaneous, may 
be arranged either with reference to the powers of mind pre- 
doDiinaiit in the production of them ; or to the mould in which 
they are cast ; or, lastly, to the subjects to which they relate." 
He determined to use all three of these methods in dividing 
his poems into classes, and also, as far as possible, to follow 
"an order of time, commencing with Childhood, and termi- 
nating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality." 

The disadvantage, one might almost say the absurdity, of 
such a mixed method is obvious. The real value of classifica- 
tion lies in the unfolding of a single organic principle. Con- 
fusion is introduced when a compromise is made. It becomes 
difficult, if not impossible, to understand just which one of 
several reasons has been allowed to determine any particular 
feature of the arrangement. One might as well try to classify I 
flowers, at one and the same time, by their structure, their 
colour, and the order of their appearance. | 

Tennyson's mind was not possessed by that sharp philo- | 
sophical distinction between Fancy and Imagination which 
played so large a part with Coleridge and Wordsworth, He 
had little of the analytical temper which dehghts in making 
programmes. His view of poetry was less theoretical, more 
practical and concrete, — the view of an artist, who regards 
his work as the direct and vital expression of his life, — rather 
than the view of a philosopher, who looks back upon his work 
as the illustration of a formula, and endeavours to make it fit. 



INTRODUCTION Ixvii 

We find, therefore, that in the various editions of his col- 
lected works the poems are given, in general, according to 
the chronological order, beginning with Jicvenilia^ and closing 
with those which were contained in the last-published volume. 
From the first, this chronological arrangement involved a cer- 
tain outline of symmetrical development, following the succes- 
sive impulses which came into his poetic art, and bringing 
together, quite naturally, poems in which a certain relation of 
spirit and manner may be felt. Later it was necessary, for 
the sake of order, to give a systematic arrangement to pieces 
which were written at different times, like the Idylls of the 
King and the Dramas. The general result of this method has 
been to present the longer poems, The Princess, Maud, In 
Metnoriam, and the Idylls of the King, in the centre of 
Tennyson's work, preceded by the miscellaneous poems of 
youth and followed by the miscellaneous poems of age. The 
collection begins with " Claribel," a lyric of delicate artistry, 
and ends with " Crossing the Bar," a lyric of profound meaning. 

But for the purpose of the present volume I think some- 
thing a little different is desirable and possible. For here we 
have not the full record of his hfe and work as poet, but a 
selection of poems chosen to show his chief characteristics, to 
represent the best that he has done in the different fields of 
his art, and to stand, at least approximately, as a measure of 
his contributions to that which is permanent in the various 
departments of English poetry. It is natural, therefore, and 
indeed almost necessary for the end which we have in view, 
to try to arrange these contributions in general groups. 

The principle which I have followed is practical rather than 
theoretical. The old Greek division — lyric, dramatic, epic 
— could not well be strictly followed because so much of 
Tennyson's work hes in the border-lands between these three 
great domains. The purely chronological arrangement was 



Ixviii INTRODUCTION 

impracticable because it would separate, by long distances, 
poems which are as closely related as " Break, break, break," 
and "In the Valley of Cauteretz " ; " Morte d'Arthur" and 
"Cxuinevere" ; and the different sections oi In Afemoriam. 

It seems to me better to bring together the poems which 
are really most alike in their general purpose and effect. 

I. Thus, for example, there is a kind of poetry of which the 
first charm resides in its appeal to the sense of beauty. This is 
not its only quality, of course, for all verse must have a mean- 
ing in order to have a value. But the prevailing effect of the 
kind of poetry of which I am speaking is the feeling of pleasure 
in graceful form, rich colour, the clear and memorable vision of 
outward things, or the utterance of emotion in haunting music. 
Poems which ha\e this musical and picturesque quality in pre- 
dominance (whether or not they carry with them a deeper 
significance) are first of all Melodies and Pictures. With this 
kind of verse Tennyson began ; in it, as his art was developed, 
he attained a rare mastery ; and to it a great deal of his most 
finely finished work belongs. 

For this reason the present volume begins with a selection of 
lyrics of this general class : first, those in which the melodic 
element, the verbal music, is the main charm ; second, those 
in which the chief delight comes from the pictorial element, 
the vivid description of things seen. I do not imagine that this 
distinction can be closely applied, or that all readers would 
draw it in the same way. But at least I hope that in both 
groups of this main division a certain order of advance can be 
seen : a deeper meaning coming into the melodies, a broader 
human interest coming into the pictures. 

II. In the next general division, — Ballads, Idyls, and 
Character-Pieces, — the significance has become more impor- 
tant than the form. The interest of the poems lies in the 
story which they tell, in the character which they reveal, in 



INTRODUCTION Ixix 

the mood of human experience which they depict. The chief 
value of the melody lies in its vital relation to the mood. The 
great charm of the bits of natural description hes in their almost 
invariable harmony with the central thought of the poem. The 
idyl is a picture coloured by an emotion and containing a human 
figure, or figures, in the foreground. It lies in the border-land 
between the lyric and the epic. The -character-piece is a 
monologue in which a person is disclosed in utterance, mainly, 
if not altogether, from the side of thought, of remembrance, of 
reflection. It lies in the border-land between the epic and 
the drama. The dramatic lyric is an emotional self-disclosure, 
not of the poet himself, but of some chosen character, histori- 
cal or imaginary. It lies in the border-land between the lyric 
and the drama. The ballad is a story told in song, briefly 
and with strong feeling. It may receive a dramatic touch by 
being told in character. But usually it belongs in the border- 
land between the epic and the lyric. 

Turning now to the poems which are brought together in 
this second division, we find that their controlHng purpose is 
to tell us something about human character and life. They 
are larger in every way (though not necessarily more perfect) 
than the Melodies and Pictures^ but their theme is still confined 
to a single event, a single character, or a single mood. They 
are related to the epic as the short story is to the novel. 
Their dramatic element is fully expressed only in the person 
who is speaking ; the other characters and the plot of the play 
are implied. Maud is, I believe, the unique example of a 
drama presented in successive lyrics, — a lyrical Monodrama. 

III. The reason why selections from Tennyson's regular 
dramas have not been given in this volume is stated in another 
place. The limitations of space have prevented the use of any- 
thing more than fragments of his epics. They will be found 
in the third general division. Selections from Epic Poems ^ and 



Ixx INTRODUCTION 

are to be taken chiefly as illustrations of his manner of dealing 
with a broader theme. To judge how far he was able to tell a 
long rich story, how far he understood the architectural prin- 
ciples of epic poetry, one must turn directly to The Princess 
and IdyUs of the King, and study them not in fragments but 
as complete poems. 

IV. In the fourth general division, Personal and Philosophic 
Poems, we hear Tennyson speaking to us more directly, deliver- 
ing his personal message in regard to problems of life and 
destiny, giving his own answers to questions of faith and duty. 
I do not mean that these are the only poems in which his per- 
sonal convictions are expressed ; nor that these poems are 
always and altogether subjective and confessional. Doubtless 
in some of them, (as, for example, "The Ancient Sage,") there 
is a dramatic element. But this is what I mean : the chief 
element of interest in these poems hes in what Matthew 
Arnold calls "the criticism of life," — not abstract, imper- 
sonal, indirect criticism, but the immediate utterance of Ten- 
nyson's deepest thoughts and feelings. Here we have what 
he wishes to say to us, (not as preacher or philosopher or 
politician, but as poet,) about the right love of country, the 
true service of art, and the real life of the spirit. 

There is room for difference of opinion in regard to the 
place of particular poems in these general divisions. But I feel 
sure that the order of the divisions is that which should be 
followed in trying to estimate the quality and permanent value 
of Tennyson's work. 

The first object of poetry is to impart pleasure through 
the imagination by the expression of ideas and feehngs in 
metrical language. But there is rank and degree in pleasures. 
The highest are those in which man's best powers find play : 
the powers of love and hope and faith which strengthen and 
ennoble human nature. Thus from the verbal melodies and 



INTRODUCTION Ixxi 

pictures which have so delicate an enchantment for the aesthetic 
sense, we pass onward and upward to the human portraits 
which have a story to tell, and the larger scenes in which the 
social life of man is illustrated ; and from these we rise again 
to the region where divine philosophy becomes " musical as is 
Apollo's lute." The singer whose melodies charm us is a true 
poet. The bard whose message thrills, uplifts, and inspires us 
is a great poet. 

VI 
THE QUALITIES OF TENNYSON'S POETRY 

" His music was the south-wind's sigh, 
His lamp, the maiden's downcast eye, 
And ever the spell of beauty came 
And turned the drowsy world to flame. 
By lake and stream and gleaming hall 
And modest copse and the forest tall, 
"Where'er he went, the magic guide 
Kept its place by the poet's side. 
Said melted the days like cups of pearl. 
Served high and low, the lord and the churl. 
Loved harebells nodding on a rock, 
A cabin hung with curling smoke. 
Ring of axe or hum of wheel 
Or gleam which use can paint on steel, 
And huts and tents ; nor loved he less 
Stately lords in palaces. 
Princely women hard to please, 
Fenced by form and ceremony, 
Decked by rites and courtly dress 
And etiquette of gentilesse. 



He came to the green ocean's brim 
And saw the wheeling sea-birds skim. 
Summer and winter, o'er the wave 



Ixxii INTRODUCTION 

Like creatures of a skiey mould 
Impassible to heat or cold. 
He stood before the tumbling main 
With joy too tense for sober brain ; 



And he, the bard, a crystal soul 
Sphered and concentric with the whole." 

E]\TERSON : The Poetic Gift. 

If an unpublished poem by Tennyson — say an idyll of 
chivalry, a classical character-piece, a modern dramatic lyric, 
or even a Uttle song — were discovered, and given out with- 
out his name, it would be easy, provided it belonged to his 
best work, to recognize it as his. But it is by no means easy 
to define just what it is that makes his poetry recognizable. 
It is not the predominance of a single trait or characteristic. 
If that were the case, it would be a simple matter to put one's 
finger upon the hall-mark. It is not a fixed and exaggerated 
mannerism. That is the sign of the Tennysonians, rather than 
of their master. His style varies from the luxuriance of '' A 
Dream of Fair Women " to the simplicity of " The Oak," from 
the lightness of "The Brook" to the stateliness of "Guine- 
vere." There is as much difference of manner between " The 
Gardener's Daughter" and "Ulysses," as there is between 
Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" and his "Dion." 

The most remarkable thing about Tennyson's poetry as a 
whole is that it expresses so fully and so variously the qualities 
of a many-sided and well-balanced nature. But when we look 
at the poems separately we see that, in almost every case, the 
quality which is most closely related to the subject of the poem 
plays the leading part in giving it colour and form. There is 
a singular fitness, a harmonious charm in his work, not unlike 
that which distinguishes the painting of Titian. It is not, 
indeed, altogether spontaneous and unstudied. It has the 
effect of choice, of fine selection. But it is inevitable enough 



INTRODUCTION Ixxiii 

in its way. The choice being made, it would be hard to better 
it. The words are the right words, and each stands in its 
right place. 

The one thing that cannot justly be said of it, it seems to 
me, is precisely what Tennyson says in a certain place : — 

I do but sing because I must, 
And pipe but as the linnets sing. 

That often seems true of Burns and Shelley, sometimes of 
Keats. But it is not true of Milton, of Gray, of Tennyson. 
They do not pour forth their song 

" In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 

I shall endeavour in the remaining pages of this introduction 
to describe and illustrate some of the qualities which are found 
in Tennyson's poetry. 

I. His diction is lucid, suggestive, melodious. He avoids, 
for the most part, harsh and strident words, intricate con- 
structions, strange rhymes, startling contrasts. He chooses 
expressions which have a natural rhythm, an easy flow, a 
clear meaning. He has a rare mastery of metrical resources. 
Many of his lyrics seem to be composed to a musical cadence 
which his inward ear has caught in some happy phrase. 

He prefers to use those metrical forms which are free and 
fluent, and in which there is room for subtle modulations 
and changes. In the stricter modes of verse he is less happy. 
The sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, the heroic couplet, the 
swift couplet (octosyllabic), — these he seldom uses, and little 
of his best work is done in these forms. Even in four-stress 
iambic triplets, the metre in which "The Two Voices " is written', 
he seems constrained and awkward. He is at his best in the 
long swinging lines of "■ Locksley Hall " (eight-stress trochaic 
couplets) ; or in a free blank verse (five-stress iambic), which 
admits all the Miltonic liberty of shifted and hovering accents, 



Ixxiv INTRODUCTION 

grace-notes, omitted stresses, and the like ; or in mixed meas- 
ures like "The Revenge " and the Wellington Ode, where the 
rhythm is now iambic and now trochaic ; or in metres which 
he invented, like " The Daisy," or revived, Hke I?i Meino- 
riam ; or in httle songs like " Break, break, break," and "The 
Bugle Song," where the melody is as unmistakable and as 
indefinable as the feeling. 

He said, " Englishmen will spoil English verses by scanning 
them when they are reading, and they confound accent with 
quantity." " In a blank verse you can have from three up to 
eight beats ; but, if you vary the beats unusually, your ordinary 
newspaper critic sets up a howl." {Meinoir, II, 12, 14.) 
He Hked the " run-on " from line to line, the overflow from 
stanza to stanza. Much of his verse is impossible to analyze 
if you insist on looking for regular feet according to the 
classic models ; but if you read it according to the principle 
which Coleridge explained in the preface to " Christabel," by 
"counting the accents, not the syllables," you will find that it 
falls into a natural rhythm. It seems as if his own way of 
reading it aloud, in a sort of chant, were almost inevitable. 

This close relation of his verse to music may be felt in 
Maud, and in his perfect little lyrics like the autumnal 
"Song," "The Throstle," "Tears, idle tears," "Sweet and 
low," and " Far — far — away." Here also we see the power 
of suggestiveness, the atmospheric effect, in his diction. Every 
word is in harmony with the central emotion of the song, 
vague, delicate, intimate, mingled of sweetness and sadness. 

The most beautiful illustration of this is "Crossing the Bar " 
(p. 314). Notice how the metre, in each stanza, rises to the 
long third line, and sinks away again in the shorter fourth line. 
The poem is in two parts ; the first stanza corresponding, in 
every hne, to the third ; the second stanza, to the fourth. In 
each division of the song there is first, a clear, solemn, tranquil 



INTRODUCTION Ixxv 

note, — a reminder that the day is over and it is time to 
depart. The accent hovers over the words "sunset" and 
<'twiHght," and falls distinctly on '* star " and "bell." Then 
come two thoughts of sadness, the " moaning of the bar," the 
" sadness of farewell," from which the voyager prays to be 
delivered. The answer follows in the two pictures of peace 
and joy, — the full, calm tide bearing him homeward, — the 
vision of the unseen Pilot who has guided and will guide 
him to the end of his voyage. Every image in the poem is 
large and serene. Every word is simple, clear, harmonious. 

The movement of a very different kind of music — martial, 
sonorotis, thrilling — may be heard in "The Charge of the 
Heavy Brigade." 

Up the hill, up the hill, 
Gallopt the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade, — 

reproduces with extraordinary force the breathless, toilsome, 
thundering assault. 

His verse often seems to adapt itself to his meaning with an 
almost magical effect. Thus, in the Wellington Ode, when 
the spirit of Nelson welcomes the great warrior to his tomb in 
St. Paul's, — 

Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest, 

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest, 

With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest ? — 

we can almost hear the funeral march and see the vast, sorrow- 
ful procession. In " Locksley Hall," — 

Love took up the hai-p of Life, and smote on all the chords with might ; 
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembhng, pass'd in music out of sight, — 

what value there is in the word " trembling" and in the slight 
secondary pause that follows it ; how the primary pause in the 
preceding bar, dividing it, emphasizes the word " Self." In 



Ixxvi INTRODUCTION 

The Princess there is a line describing one of the curious 
Chinese ornaments in which a series of openwork balls are 
carved one inside of another : — 

Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere. 

One can almost see the balls turning and gUstening. In the 
poem "To Virgil" there isa verse praising the great Man- 
tuan's lordship over language : — 

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word. 

This illustrates the very quality that it describes. " Flower- 
ing" is the magical word. 

But it is not so often the '' lonely word " that is wonderful 
in Tennyson, as it is the company of words which blossom 
together in colour-harmony, the air of lucid beauty that 
envelops the many features of a landscape and blends them 
in a perfect picture. This is his peculiar charm ; and it is 
illustrated in many passages, but nowhere better than in /;/ 
Memoriam, Ixxxvi, — 

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over brake and bloom 

And meadow, — 

and in the perfect description of autumn's sad tranquillity, 
Section xi, — 

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, 

And waves that sway themselves in rest, 
And dead calm in that noble breast 
Which heaves but with the heaving deep. 

2. Tennyson's closeness of observation, fidelity of descrip- 
tion, and felicity of expression in nature-poetry have often 
been praised. In spite of his near-sightedness he saw things 
with great clearness and accuracy. All his senses seem to 



INTRODUCTION Ixxvii 

have been alert and true. In this respect he was better fitted 
to be an observer than Wordsworth, in whom the colour-sense 
was not especially vivid, and whose poetry shows little or no 
evidence of the sense of fragrance, although his ears caught 
sounds with wonderful fineness and his eyes were quick to note 
forms and movements. Bayard Taylor once took a walk with 
Tennyson in the Isle of Wight, and afterward wrote : " During 
the conversation with which we beguiled the way I was struck 
with the variety of his knowledge. Not a little flower on the 
downs, which the sheep had spared, escaped his notice, and 
the geology of the coast, both terrestrial and submarine, was 
perfectly familiar to him. I remembered the remark I once 
heard from the lips of a distinguished English author (Thack- 
eray), that 'Tennyson was the wisest man he knew,' and could 
well beHeve that he was sincere in making it." 

But Tennyson's relation to nature differed from Wordsworth's 
in another respect than that which has been mentioned, and 
one in which the advantage lies with the earlier poet. Words- 
worth had a personal intimacy with nature, a confiding and 
rejoicing faith in her unity, her life, and her deep beneficence, 
which made him able to say : — 

" This prayer I make, 
Knowing that Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her : 't is her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy: for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings." 



Ixxviii INTRODUCTION 

There is no utterance like this in Tennyson's poetry. He 
had not a profound and permanent sense of that " something 
far more deeply interfused " in nature which gives her a con- 
soling, liberating, nourishing power, — a maternal power. In 
" Enoch Arden " the sohtude of nature, even in her richest 
beauty, is terrible. In " Locksley Hall " the disappointed 
lover calls not on Mother-Nature, but on his " Mother-Age," 
the age of progress, of advancing knowledge, to comfort and 
help him. In Maud the unhappy hero says, not that he 
will turn to nature, but that he will ' bury himself in his books.' 
Whether it was because Tennyson saw the harsher, sterner 
aspects of nature more clearly than Wordsworth did, or because 
he had more scientific knowledge, or because he was less simple 
and serene, it remains true that he did not have that steady 
and glad confidence in her vital relation to the spirit of man, 
that overpowering joy in surrender to her purifying and mould- 
ing influence, which Wordsworth expressed in the '' Lines com- 
posed a few miles above Tintern Abbey," in 1798, and in 
"Devotional Incitements" in 1832, and in many other poems 
written between these dates. Yet it must be observed that 
Wordsworth himself, in later Hfe, felt some abatement of his 
unquestioning and all-sufficing faith in nature, or at least 
admitted the need of something beside her ministry to sat- 
isfy all the wants of the human spirit. For in *' An Evening 
Voluntary" (1834), he writes : — 

" By grace divine, 
Not otherwise, O Nature ! are we thine." 

Mr. Stopford Brooke has observed that the poetry of both 
Scott and Byron contains many utterances of delight in the 
wild and solitary aspects of nature ; and that we find Httle 
or nothing of this kind in Tennyson. From this Mr. Brooke 
infers that he had less real love of nature for her own sake 



INTRODUCTION Ixxix 

than the two poets named. The inference is not well 
grounded. 

Both Scott and Byron were very dependent upon social 
pleasure for their enjoyment of hfe, — much more so than 
Tennyson. Any one who will read Byron's letters may judge 
how far his professed passion for the solitudes of the ocean 
and the Alps was sincere, and how far it was a pose. Indeed, 
in one place, if I mistake not, he maintains the theory that it 
is the presence of man's work — the ship on the ocean, the 
city among the hills — that lends the chief charm to nature. 

Tennyson was one of the few great poets who have proved 
their love of nature by living happily in the country. From 
boyhood up he was well content to spend long, lonely days by 
the seashore, in the woods, on the downs. It is true that as a 
rule his temperament found more joy in rich landscapes and 
gardens of opulent bloom, than in the wild, the savage, the 
desolate. But no man who was not a true lover of nature for 
her own sake could have written the "Ode to Memory," or 
this stanza from " Early Spring " : — 

The woods with living airs 

How softly fann'd, 
Light airs from where the deep, 

All down the sand, 
Is breathing in his sleep, 

Heard by the land. 

Nor is there any lack of feeling for the sublime in such a poem 
as " The Voice and the Peak " : — 

The voice and the Peak 

Far over summit and lawn, 
The lone glow and long roar 

Green-rushing from the rosy thrones of dawn ! 

It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrations of Ten- 
nyson's extraordinary vividness of perception and truthfulness 



Ixxx INTRODUCTION 

of description in regard to nature. He excels, first of all, in 
delicate pre-Raphaelite work, — the painting of the flowers in 
the meadow, the buds on the trees, the movements of waves 
and streams, the birds at rest and on the wing. Looking at 
the water, he sees the 

Little breezes dusk and shiver 
Thro' the wave that runs for ever 
By the island in the river 

Flowing down to Camelot. 

[The Lady of Shalott.] 

With a single touch he gives the aspect of the mill stream : — 

The sleepy pool above the dam, 
The pool beneath it never still. 

[The Miller's Daughter.] 

He shows us 

a shoal 
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn 
Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot 
Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand, 
But if a man w^ho stands upon the brink 
But lift a shining hand against the sun, 
There is not left the twinkle of a fin 
Betwixt the cressy islets white in flower. 

[Geraint and Enid.] 

He makes us see 

the waterfall 

Which ever sounds and shines, 

A pillar of white light upon the w^all 

Of purple cliffs, aloof descried. 

^ [Ode to Memory.] 

He makes us hear, through the nearer voice of the stream. 

The drumming thunder of the huger fall 

At distance, 

[Geraint and Enid.] 

or 

The scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave. 

[Maud.] 



INTRODUCTION Ixxxi 

Does he speak of trees? He knows the difference between 

the poplars' 

noise of falling showers, 

[Lancelot and Elaine.] 

and 

The dry-tongued laurels' pattering talk, 

and the voice of the cedar, 

sighing for Lebanon 
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East. 

[Maud.] 

He sees how 

A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime, 

[Maud.] 

and how the chestnut-buds begin 

To spread into the perfect fan, 
Above the teeming ground. 

[Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.] 

He has watched the hunting-dog in its restless sleep, — 

Like a dog, he hunts in drean^s, — 

[Locksley Hall.] 

and noted how the lonely heron, at sundown, 

forgets his melancholy. 
Lets down his other leg, and stretching, dreams 
Of goodly supper in the distant pool. 

[Gareth and Lynette.] 

There is a line in In Memoriam, — 

Flits by the sea-blue bird of March, — 

which Tennyson meant to describe the kingfisher. A friend 
criticised it and said that some other bird must have been 
intended, because " the kingfisher shoots by, flashes by, but 
never flits." But, in fact, to ///, which means "to move 
lightly and swiftly," is precisely the word for the motion of this 



Ixxxii INTRODUCTION 

bird, as it darts along the stream with even wing-strokes, shifting 
its place from one post to another. Tennyson gives both the 
colour and the flight of the kingfisher with absolute precision. 
But it is not only in this pre-Raphaelite work that his 
extraordinary skill is shown. He has also the power of ren- 
dering vague, wide landscapes, under the menacing shadow of 
a coming storm, in the calm of an autumnal morning, or in the 
golden light of sunset. Almost always such landscapes are 
coloured by the prevailing emotion or sentiment of the poem. 
I Tennyson holds with Coleridge that much of what we see in 
\ nature is the reflection of our own hfe, our inmost feelings : — 

" Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud." 

In "The Gardener's Daughter," Tennyson describes the wed- 
ding-garment : — 

All the land in flowery squares, 
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, 
Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud 
Drew downward : but all else of heaven was pure 
Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge, 
And May with me from head to heel. 

But in " Guinevere," it is the shroud : — 

For all abroad, 
Beneath a moon unseen albeit at full. 
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face. 
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still. 

3. The wide range of human sympathy in Tennyson's work 
is most remarkable. The symbolic poem, " Merlin and The 
Gleam" (p. 232), describes his poetic life. Following the 
Gleam, — "the higher poetic imagination," — he passes from 
fairy-land into the real world and interprets the characters 
and conflicts, the labours and longings, of all sorts and 
conditions of men. He speaks for childhood in "The 



INTRODUCTION Ixxxiii 

May Queen " and " In the Children's Hospital " ; for moth- 
erhood in " Rizpah " and " Demeter " ; for seamen in ''The 
Revenge " and " Columbus " and "The Voyage of Maeldune" 
and " Enoch Arden " ; for soldiers in " The Charge of the 
Light Brigade" and "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade" 
and "The Defence of Lucknow" ; for philosophers in "Lucre- 
tius" and "The Ancient Sage" ; for the half-crazed ascetic in 
"St. Simeon StyHtes," and for the fearless reformer in "Sir 
John Oldcastle " ; for the painter in " Romney's Remorse"; 
for the rustic in the "Northern Farmer"; for religious 
enthusiasm, active, in "Sir Galahad," and passive, in "St. 
Agnes' Eve " ; for peasant Hfe in " Dora," and for princely 
Hfe in "The Day-Dream"; for lovers of different types in 
"Maud" and " Locksley Hall" and "Aylmer's Field" and 
" Love and Duty " and " Happy " and " CEnone " and " The 
Lover's Tale " and " Lady Clare." 

He is not, it must be admitted, quite as deep, as inward, 
as searching as Wordsworth is in some of his peasant portraits. 
There is a revealing touch in " Michael," in " Margaret," in 
"Resolution and Independence," to which Tennyson rarely, 
if ever, attains. Nor is there as much individuality and 
intensity in his pictures as we find in the best of Browning's 
dramatis personcB^ Hke " Saul " and " Rabbi Ben Ezra " and 
" Andrea del Sarto " and " The Flight of the Duchess." Ten- 
nyson brings out in his characters that which is most natural 
and normal. He does not delight, as Browning does, in dis- 
covering the strange, the eccentric. Nor has he Browning's 
extraordinary acquaintance with the technical details of differ- 
ent arts and trades, and with the singular features of certain 
epochs of history, like the Renaissance. 

But, on the other hand, if Tennyson has less intellectual 
curiosity in his work, he has more emotional sympathy. His 
characters are conceived on broader lines ; they are more 



Ixxxiv INTRODUCTION 

human and typical. Even when he finds his subject in some 
classic myth, it is the human element that he brings out. 
This is the thing that moves him. He studies the scene, the 
period, carefully and closely in order to get the atmosphere 
of time and place. But these are subordinate. The main 
interest, for him, lies in the living person into whose place 
he puts himself and with whose voice he speaks. Thus in 
" Tithonus " he dwells on the loneliness of one who must "vary 
from the kindly race of men " since the gift of "cruel immor- 
tahty " has been conferred upon him. In " Demeter and 
Persephone " the most beautiful passage is that in which the 
goddess-mother tells of her yearning for her lost child. 

4. Tennyson's work is marked by frequent reference to 
the scientific discoveries and social movements of his age. 
Wordsworth's prophetic vision of the time " when the discov- 
eries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as 
proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be 
employed," because these things and the relations under 
which they are contemplated will be so familiarized that we 
shall see that they are " parts of our life as enjoying and suf- 
fering beings," — this prediction of the advent of science, 
transfigured by poetry, as "a dear and genuine inmate of 
the household of man," was fulfilled, at least in part, in the 
poetry of Tennyson. 

In " The Two Voices " Tennyson alludes to modern oste- 
ology : — 

Before the little ducts began 

To feed thy bones with lime, and ran 

Their covirse, till thou wert also man. j 

In the twenty-first section of In Me?Ho?'iam he notes the | 
discovery of the satellite of Neptune : — | 

* When Science reaches forth her arms ' 1 

To feel from world to world, and charms | 

Her secret from the latest moon.' 



INTRODUCTION Ixxxv 

In the twenty- fourth section he speaks of sun-spots : — 

The very source and fount of Day 
Is dash'd with wandering isles of night. 

In the thirty-fifth section he alkides to the process of denuda- 
tion : — 

The sound of streams that swift or slow 

Draw down Ionian hills, and sow 
The dust of continents to be. 

The nebular hypothesis of Laplace and the theory of evolu- 
tion are conceived and expressed with wonderful imaginative 
power in the one hundred and eighteenth section (p. 304). 
In the fourth section a subtle fact of physical science is trans- 
lated into an image of poetic beauty : — 

Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears. 
That grief hath shaken into frost ! 

" Locksley Hall " is full of echoes of the scientific inventions 
and the social hopes of the mid-century. In " Locksley Hall 
Sixty Years After " the old man speaks, with disenchanted spirit, 
of the failure of many of these hopes and the small value of 
many of these inventions, but he still holds to the vision of 
human progress guided by a divine, unseen Power : — 

When the schemes and all the systems, Kingdoms and Republics fall. 
Something kindlier, higher, holier — all for each and each for all ? 

All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Justice, Love, and Truth ; 
All the milhons one at length with all the visions of my youth 1 

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue — 
I have seen her far away — for is not Earth as yet so young .^ 

Every tiger madness muzzled, every seipent passion kill'd. 
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd. 

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles. 
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles. 



Ixxxvi INTRODUCTION ||^ 

5. As in its form, so in its spirit, the poetry of Tenny- 
son is marked by a constant and controlling sense of law 
and order. He conceives the universe under the sway of 
great laws, physical and moral, which are in themselves 
harmonious and beautiful, as well as universal. Disorder, 
discord, disaster, come from the violation of these laws. 
Beauty lies not in contrast but in concord. The noblest 
character is not that in which a single faculty or passion 
is raised to the highest pitch, but that in which the balance 
of the powers is kept, and the Ufe unfolds itself in a well- 
rounded fulness : — 

That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before, 
But vaster. 

Such is the character which is drawn from memory in the 
description of Arthur Hallam in In Memoriaui ; and from 
imagination in the picture of King Arthur in the Idylls, 

Tennyson belongs in the opposite camp from the poets of 
revolt. To him such a vision of the swift emancipation of 
society as Shelley gives in "Prometheus Unbound," or "The 
Revolt of Islam," was not merely impossible ; it was wildly 
absurd, a dangerous dream. His faith in the advance of 
mankind rested on two bases ; first, his intuitive belief in the 
benevolence of the general order of the universe : — 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill : — 

and second, his practical confidence in the success — or at 
least in the immediate usefulness — of the efforts of men to 
make the world around them better little by little. Evolution, 
not revolution, was his watchword. 

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 



INTRODUCTION Ixxxvii 

is his cry in the first " Locksley Hall " ; and in the second 
he says, 

Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half -control his doom — 
Till you see the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb. 

In the patriotic poems we find that Tennyson's love of 
country is sane, sober, steadfast, thoughtful. He dislikes the 
"blind hysterics of the Celt," and fears the red "fool-fury 
of the Seine." He praises England as 

A land of settled government, 

A land of old and just renown, 
Where freedom slowly broadens down 

From precedent to precedent. 

His favourite national heroes are of the Anglo-Saxon type, 
sturdy, resolute, self-contained, following the path of duty. 
He rejoices not only in the service which England has rendered ^ 
to the cause of law-encircled liberty, but in the way in which 
she has rendered it : — 

Whatever harmonies of law 

The growing world assume, 
Thy work is thine — The single note 
From that deep chord w-hich Hampden smote 

Will vibrate to the doom. 

[England and America in 1782.] 

He praises the peaceful reformer as the chief benefactor of 
his country : — 

Not he that breaks the dams, but he 

That thro' the channels of the State 
Convoys the people's wish, is great ; 
His name is pure, his fame is free. 

[Contributed to the Shakespearean Show-Book, 1884.] 

He is a repubhcan at heart, holding that the Queen's throne 

must rest 

Broad-based upon her people's will, 

[To the Queen,] 



Ixxxviii INTRODUCTION 

and he does not hesitate to express his confidence in 

our slowly-grown 
And crown' d Republic's crowning common-sense. 

[Epilogue to Idylls of the King?^ 

But he has no faith in the unguided and ungoverned mob. 
He calls Freedom 

Thou loather of the lawless crown 

As of the lawless crowd. 

[Freedom, 1884.] 

It has been said that his poetry shows no trace of sympathy 
with the struggles of the people to resist tyranny and defend 
their liberties with the sword. This is not true. In one of 
his earHest sonnets he speaks with enthusiasm of Poland's 
fight for freedom, and in one of his latest he hails the same 
spirit and the same effort in Montenegro. In " The Third of 
February, 1852," he expresses his indignation at the coup d^etat 
by which Louis Napoleon destroyed the French Republic, and 
praises the revolutions which overthrew Charles I and James 
II. He dedicates a sonnet to Victor Hugo, the "stormy voice 
of France." With the utmost deliberation and distinctness he 
justifies the cause of the colonies in the American Revolution : 
once in ''England and America in 1782," and again in the 
ode for the " Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition," 
1886. 

It has been said that he has no sympathy with the modern 
idea of the patriotism of humanity, — that his love of his own 
country hides from him the vision of universal liberty and 
brotherhood. This is not true. He speaks of it in many 
places, — in " Locksley Hall," in "Victor Hugo," in "The 
Making of Man," — and in the "Ode sung at the Opening of 
the International Exhibition," 1861, he urges free commerce 
and peaceful cooperation among the nations : — 



INTRODUCTION Ixxxix 

Till each man find his own in all men's good, 

And all men work in noble brotherhood, 

Breaking their mailed fleets and armed towers. 

And ruling by obeying Nature's powers. 

And gathering all the fruits of earth and crown'd with all her flowers. 

It may be, as the Rev. Stopford Brooke says in his book on 
Tennyson, that this view of things is less " poetic " than that 
which is presented by the poets of revolt, that it " lowers the 
note of beauty, of fire, of aspiration, of passion." But after 
all, it was Tennyson's real view and he could not well deny or 
conceal it. The important question is whether it is true and 
just. And that is the first question which a great poet asks. 
He does not lend himself to the proclamation of follies and 
falsehoods, however fiery, merely for the sake of being more 
"poetic." 

In Tennyson's love poems, while there is often an intensity 
of passion, there is also a singular purity of feehng, a sense of 
reverence for the mystery of love, and a profound loyalty to the 
laws which it is bound to obey in a harmonious and well-ordered 
world. True, he takes the romantic, rather than the classical, 
attitude towards love. It comes secretly, suddenly, by inexpli- 
cable ways. It is irresistible, absorbing, the strongest as well 
as the most precious thing in the world. But he does not 
therefore hold that it is a thing apart from the rest of life, 
exempt, uncontrollable, lawless. On the contrary, it should 
be, in its perfection, at once the inspiration and the consum- 
mation of all that is best in life. In love, truth and honour 
and fidelity and courage and unselfishness should come to 
flower. 

There is none of the tropical iridescence of decadent ero- 
tomania in Tennyson's love poetry. The fatal shame of 
that morbid and consuming fever of the flesh is touched in 
the description of the madness of Lucretius, in " Balin and 



XC INTRODUCTION 

Balan," and in " Merlin and Vivien " ; but it is done in a way 
that reveals the essential hatefulness of lubricity. 

There is no lack of warmth and bright colour in the poems 
which speak of true love ; but it is the glow of health instead 
of the hectic flush of disease ; not the sickly hues that mask 
the surface of decay, but the livelier iris that the spring-time 
brings to the neck of the burnished dove. 

He does not fail to see the tragedies of love. There is the 
desperate ballad of " Oriana," the sombre story of " Aylmer's 
Field," the picture of the forsaken Mariana in her moated 
grange, the pathetic idyll of Elaine who died for love of 
Lancelot. But the tragic element in these poems comes from 
the thwarting of love by circumstance, not from anything 
shameful or lawless in the passion itself. 

In " The Gardener's Daughter " the story of a pure and 
simple love is told with a clean rapture that seems to make 
earth and sky glow with new beauty, and with a reticence 
that speaks not of shallow feeling, but of reverent emotion, 

refusing to fling open 

the doors that bar 
The secret bridal chambers of the heart. 

In The Princess, at the end, triumphant love rises to the 
height of prophecy, foretelling the harmony of manhood and 
womanhood in the world's great bridals : — 

' Dear, but let us type them now 
In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest 
Of equal ; seeing either sex alone 
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies 
Nor equal, nor unequal : each fulfils 
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,- 
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, 
The single pure and perfect animal, 
The two-cell'd heart beating, with one full stroke. 
Life.' 



INTRODUCTION xci 

There are two of Tennyson's poems in which the subject of 
love is treated in very different ways, but with an equally close 
and evident relation to the sense of harmony and law which 
pervades his poetry. In one of them, it seems to me, the 
treatment is wonderfully successful ; the poet makes good his 
design. In the other, I think, he comes a little short of it 
and leaves us unsatisfied and questioning. 

Maud is among the most purely impassioned presentations 
of a love-story since Shakespeare's Romeo and Jidiet. , It not 
only tells in music the growth of a deep, strong, absorbing love, 
victorious over obstacles, but it shows the redeeming, ennobling 
power of such a passion, which leads the selfish hero out of his 
bitterness and narrowness and makes him able at the last to 

say, 

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good, 

While I am over the sea ! 

Let me and my passionate love go by, 

But speak to her all things holy and high, 

"Whatever happen to me ! 

Me and my harmful love go by ; 

But come to her waking, find her asleep, 

Powers of the height. Powers of the deep. 

And comfort her tho' I die. 

The tragedy of the poem is wrought not by love, but by 
another passion, lawless, discordant, uncontrolled, — the pas- 
sion of proud hatred which brings about the quarrel with 
Maud's brother, the fatal duel, her death, the exile and mad- 
ness of her lover. But the poem does not end in darkness, 
after all, for he awakes again to *' the better mind," and the love 
whose earthly consummation his own folly has marred abides 
with him as the inspiration of a nobler life. The hero may be 
wrong in thinking that the Crimean War is to be a blessing to 
England and to the world. But he is surely right in saying. 

It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill. 



xcii INTRODUCTION 

In the Idylls of the King there are two main threads of love 
runnmg through the many-figured tapestry : Arthur's love for 
Guinevere, loyal, royal, but somewhat cold and ineffectual : 
Guinevere's love for Lancelot, disloyal and untrue, but warm 
and potent. It is the secret influence of this lawless passion, 
infecting the court, that breaks up the Round Table, and 
brings the kingdom to ruin and the King to his defeat. In 
" Guinevere " Tennyson departs from the story as it is told by 
Malory and introduces a scene entirely of his own invention : 
the last interview between Arthur, on his way to '' that great 
battle in the west," and the fallen Queen, hiding in the convent 
at Almesbury. It is a very noble scene ; noble in its setting in 
the moon-swathed pallor of the dead winter night ; noble in 
its austere splendour of high diction and slow-moving verse, 
intense with solemn passion, bare to the heart ; noble in its 
conception of the King's godlike forgiveness and of Guine- 
vere's remorse and agony of shame, too late to countervail 
the harm that she had done on earth, though not too late to 
win the heavenly pardon. All that Arthur says of the evil 
wrought by unlawful and reckless love is true : — 

The children born of thee are sword and fire, 
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. 

All that he says of the crime that it would be to condone the 
Queen's sin, for the sake of prudence and peace, reseating her 
in her place of light, 

The mockery of my people' and their bane, 

is also true, though it seems at the moment a little too much 
Hke preaching. But there is one thing lacking, — one thing 
that is necessary to make the scene altogether convincing : 
some trace of human sympathy in Arthur's " vast pity," some 
consciousness of fault or failure on his part in not giving 
Guinevere all that her nature needed to guard her from the 



INTRODUCTION xciii 

temptations of a more vivid though a lower passion. Splendid 
as his words of pardon are, and piercingly pathetic as is that 
last farewell of love, still loyal though defrauded ; yet he does 
not quite win us. He is more godUke than it becomes a 
man to be. He is too sure that he has never erred, too con- 
scious that he is above weakness or reproach. We remember 
the lonely Lancelot in his desolate castle ; we think of his 
courtesy, his devotion, his splendid courage, his winning ten- 
derness, his ardour, the unwavering passion by force of which 

His honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. 

Was it wonder that Guinevere, seeing the King absorbed in 
affairs of state, remote, abstracted, inaccessible, yielded to this 
nearer and more intimate joy? Sin it was: shame it was: 
that Tennyson makes us see clearly. But how could it have 
been otherwise ? Was not the .breaking of the law the revenge 
that nature herself took for a need unsatisfied, a harmony un- 
completed and overlooked? This is the question that remains 
unanswered at the close of the Idylls of the King. And there- 
fore I think the poem unsatisfactory in its treatment of love. 

But though Tennyson avoids this question, and lets Lancelot 
slip out of the poem at last without a word, disappearing like 
a shadow, he never falters in his allegiance to his main princi- 
ple, — the supremacy of law and order. This indeed is the 
central theme of the epic : the right of soul to rule over sense 
and the ruin that comes when the relation is reversed. The 
poem ends tragically. But above the wreck of a great human 
design the poet sees the vision of a God who " fulfils Himself 
in many ways " ; and after earth's confusions and defeats he 
sees the true-hearted King enthroned in the spiritual city and 
the repentant Queen passing 

To where beyond these voices there is peace. 



xciv INTRODUCTION 

6. A religious spirit pervades and marks the poetry of 
Tennyson. His view of the world and of human life — his 
view even of the smallest flower that blooms in the world — 
is illumined through and through by his faith in the Divine 
presence and goodness and power. This faith was not always 
serene and untroubled. It was won after a hard conflict with 
doubt and despondency, the traces of which may be seen in 
such poems as ''The Two Voices" and "The Vision of Sin." 
But the issue was never really in danger. He was not a 
doubter seeking to win a faith. He was a believer defending 
himself against misgivings, fighting to hold fast that which he 
felt to be essential to his life. The success of his struggle is 
recorded in In Mefnoriam, which rises through suffering and 
perplexity to a lofty and unshaken trust in 

The truths that never can be proved, 
Until we close with all we loved 
And all we flow from, soul in soul. 

It is not difficult to trace in his religious poems of this 
period the influence of the theology of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, 
who was one of his closest friends. The truths which Maurice 
presented most frequently, such as the immanence of God 
in nature, man's filial relation to Him, the reahty of human 
brotherhood, the final victory of Love ; the difficulties which 
he recognized in connection with these truths, such as the dis- 
orders and conflicts in nature, the apparent reckless waste of 
life, the sins and miseries of mankind ; and the way in which 
he met and overcame these difficulties, not by abstract reason- 
ing, nor by a reference to authority, but by an appeal to the 
moral and spiritual necessities and intuitions of the human 
heart, — all these are presented in Tennyson's poetry. 

In later life there seems to have been a recurrence of 
questionings, shown in such poems as *' Despair," *' De 



INTRODUCTION XCV 

Profundis," " The Ancient Sage," " Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After," "Vastness," "By an Evolutionist." But this was not 
so much a conflict arising from within, as a protest against the 
tendencies of what he called "a terrible age of unfaith," an 
effort to maintain the rights of the spirit against scientific 
materiahsm. Later still the serene, triumphant mood of the 
proem to I71 Me7noria77i was repeated in " Crossing the Bar," 
"The Silent Voices," "Faith," "The Death of the Duke of 
Clarence," and he reposed upon 

that Love which is and was 
My Father and my Brother and my God. 

In spite of his declared unwillingness to formulate his creed, 
arising partly from his conviction that humility was the right 
intellectual attitude in the presence of the great mysteries, and 
partly from the feeling that men would not understand him if 
he tried to put his belief into definite forms, it is by no means 
impossible to discover in his poetry certain clear and vivid 
visions of religious truths from which his poetic life drew 
strength and beauty. Three of these truths stand out distinct 
and dominant. 

The first is the real, personal, conscious Hfe of God. " Take 
that away," said he, " and you take away the backbone of the 
Universe." Tennyson is not a theological poet like Milton 
or Cuwper, nor even like Wordsworth or Browning. But 
hardly anything that he has written could have been written 
as it is, but for his underlying faith that God lives, and knows, 
and loves. This faith is clearly expressed in "The Higher 
Pantheism." It is not really pantheism at all, for while the 
natural world is regarded as " the Vision of Him who reigns," 
it is also the sign and symbol that the human soul is distinct 
from Him. All things reveal Him, but man's sight and hear- 
ing are darkened so that he cannot understand the revelation. 



xcvi INTRODUCTION 

God is in all things : He is with all souls, but He is not to 
be identified with the human spirit, which has " power to feel 
' I am I.' " Fellowship with Him is to be sought and found 
in prayer. 

Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 

This confidence in the reality of prayer is expressed in many 
of Tennyson's deeper poems. We find it in " Enoch Arden," 
in " St. Agnes' Eve," in " The Palace of Art," in In Memoriam, 
in " The Two Voices," in the " Ode on the Death of the Duke 
of Wellington," in '^ Doubt and Prayer," in " Elaine," in 
"Guinevere," in " Morte d'Arthur " : — 

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. 

Tennyson's optimism was dependent upon his faith in a 
God to whom men can pray. It was not a matter of tempera- 
ment, like Browning's optimism. Tennyson inherited from his 
father a strain of gloomy blood, a tendency to despondency. 
He escaped from it only by learning to trust in the Divine 
wisdom and love : — 

That God which ever lives and loves, 

One God, one law, one element, 

And one far-off divine event. 
To which the whole creation moves. 

The second truth which stands out in the poetry of Tenny- 
son is the freedom of the human will. This is a mystery : — 

Our wills afe ours, we know not how. 

It is also an indubitable reality : — 

This main-miracle, that thou art thou, 

With power on thine own act and on the world. 

[De Profundis.] 



INTRODUCTION xcvii 

The existence of such Hberty of action in created beings 
implies a self-limitation on the part of God, but it is essential 
"to moral responsibility and vital communion with the Divine. 
If man is only a "magnetic mockery," a "cunning cast in 
clay," he has no real life of his own, nothing to give back 
to God. The joy of effort and the glory of virtue depend 
upon freedom. This is the meaning of Enid's Song, in " The 
Marriage of Geraint " : — 

For man is man and master of his fate. 

This is the central thought of that strong little poem called 

"Will": — 

O well for him whose will is strong ! 
He suffers, but he will not suffer long ; 
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong. 

This is the theme of the last lyric of Li Metnoriain : — 

O living will that shalt endure 

"When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
Rise in the spiritual rock. 

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure. 

The third truth which is vitally embodied in Tennyson's 
poems is the assurance of Life after Death. This he believed 
in most deeply and uttered most passionately. He felt that 
the present Ufe would be poor and pitiful, almost worthless 
and unendurable, without the hope of Immortality. The 
rolling lines of " Vastness " are a long protest against the cold 
doctrine that death ends all. " Wages " is a swift utterance of 
the hope which inspires Virtue : — 

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. 

The second " Locksley Hall," the Wellington Ode, "The 
May Queen," "Guinevere," "Enoch Arden," "The Deserted 



XCVlli INTRODUCTION 

House," "The Poet's Song," "Happy," the lines on "The 
Death of the Duke of Clarence," "The Silent Voices," — it 
is not possible to enumerate the poems in which the clear faith 
in a future life finds expression. In Memo?'iam is altogether 
filled and glorified with the passion of Immortality : not a 
vague and impersonal survival in other forms, but a contin- 
uance of individual life beyond the grave : — 

Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside ; 
And I shall know him when we meet. 

It is a vain and idle thing for men who are themselves 
indifferent to the spiritual aspects of life, or perhaps hostile 
and contemptuous towards a religious view of the universe, to 
declare that there is no place in poetry for such subjects, and 
to sneer at every poem in which they appear as " a disguised 
sermon." No doubt there are many alleged poems dealing 
with religion which deserve no better name : versified exposi- 
tions of theological dogma : creeds in metre : moral admoni- 
tions tagged with rhyme ; a weariness to the flesh. But so 
there are alleged poems which deal with the facts of the visible 
world and of human history in the same dull didactic manner : 
botanical treatises in verse : rhymed chronicles : doctrinaire 
dramas. The fault, in both cases, lies not in the subjects, but 
in the spirit in which they are approached. 

It is not the presence of religion that spoils religious verse. 
It is the absence of poetry. Poetry is vision. Poetry is music. 
Poetry is an overflow of wonder and joy, pity and love. Truths 
which lie in the spiritual realm have as much power to stir the 
heart to this overflow as truths which lie in the physical realm. 
There is an imaginative vision of the meaning of religious truths 
— a swift flashing of their significance upon the inward eye, a 
sudden thrilling of their music through the inward ear — which 



INTRODUCTION xcix 

is as full of beauty and wonder, as potent to '' surprise us by a 
fine excess," as any possible human experience. It is poetic 
in the very highest sense of the word. There may be poetry, 
and very admirable poetry, without it. But the poet who 
never sees it, nor sings of it, in whose verse there is no ray of 
light, no note of music, from beyond the range of the five 
senses, has never reached the heights nor sounded the depths 
of human nature. 

The influence of Tennyson's poetry in revealing the reahty 
and beauty of three great religious beliefs — the existence of 
the Divine Spirit who is our Father, the freedom of the human 
will, and the personal life after death — was deep, far-reaching, 
and potent. He stood among the doubts and conflicts of the 
last century as a witness for the things that are invisible and 
eternal : the things that men may forget if they will, but if 
they forget them their hearts wither, and the springs of inspi- 
ration run dry. His rich and musical verse brought a message 
of new cheer and courage to the young men of that question- 
ing age who were fain to defend their spiritual heritage against 
the invasions of a hard and fierce materialism. In the vital 
conflict for the enlargement of faith to embrace the real dis- 
coveries of science, he stood forth as a leader. In the great 
silent reaction from the solitude of a consistent skepticism, 
his voice was a clear-toned bell calhng the unwilHng exiles of 
belief to turn again and follow the guidance of the Spirit. No 
new arguments were his. But the sweetness of a poet's per- 
suasion, the splendour of high truths embodied in a poet's 
imagination, the convincing beauty of noble beliefs set forth 
in clear dream and solemn vision, — these were the powers 
that he employed. 

And if the age of doubt in which he lived has passed, not 
into an age of denial, but, as it seems, into the dawn of a new 
age of beHef, they who look and long for the light of spiritual 



C INTRODUCTION 

life to rise yet higher and spread yet more gloriously, will 
honour Tennyson not only as a poet, but also as a prophet, — 
a defender of the inward treasures that make Ufe worth living, 
an interpreter of the true meaning of the world, a seer who 
foresaw the victory of faith and helped mightily to win it. 

HENRY VAN DYKE. 



MEMORANDA 



MEMORANDA 



I. A METRICAL NOTE 

A FEW words are needed to explain the metrical terms which 
are used in this book. This explanation is not intended to set 
forth a new theory of English verse, nor to discuss the com- 
parative merits of the different theories which have been pro- 
posed and defended in the volumes named at the end of this 
memorandum. 

The study of English metrics is still in its initial stage. The 
development of English verse has not followed the Hne of a 
strict and well-defined system of metrical law. A large body 
of poetry has grown up without the conscious adoption of a 
fixed and universal standard of measurement, or a set of rules 
with recognized authority. Doubtless this body of poetry has 
developed in harmony with certain fundamental laws, — laws 
which belong to man's nature and control the sense of pleasure 
produced in the human mind by the perception of rhythm. 
They may therefore be called, with propriety, natural laws. 
But in order to discover what they are, and to arrange them 
in a system, we must approach the body of English poetry 
as it already exists, not with a fixed theory, but with an 
open mind. 

We must observe and consider the verse-structure of the best 
poems, those which have given pleasure to the most intelligent 
readers of English, those which are regarded by competent 
judges as representative examples of good metrical form. We 
must read them naturally and simply, not according to arbitrary 



civ MEMORANDA 

rules and theories derived from the prosody of other languages, 
but following the native rhythm of the English tongue. From 
this reading we must seek to discover the actual balance and 
flow of the verse, the number and relation of the parts of 
which it is composed, the nature of the recurring cadence upon 
which its charm depends. 

The art of poetry in EngUsh is not to be evolved out of the 
inner consciousness of professors, nor deduced from ancient 
metrical systems. It is to be studied inductively in the mate- 
rial which has already been produced by the great poets who 
have written in English. By this inductive study only, we 
may hope to arrive, in the course of time, at something like 
an orderly and systematic knowledge of the laws and principles 
of EngUsh verse. 

But meantime we need certain terms to describe the forms 
of verse which we are studying, and these terms must be 
defined in order that they may carry an intelligible meaning. 
The object of this memorandum is simply to tell the reader 
why certain metrical terms are used here in preference to 
others, and what they mean. 

It is generally admitted to-day that the controlling principle 
in English verse is not quantity but accent. In this it differs 
radically from Greek and Latin verse. A line of EngUsh 
poetry does not consist of a certain number of feet, each foot 
composed of a certain number of syllables of definite length 
arranged in a certain order. The attempt to read it in that 
way results in an intolerable sing-song and a most unnatural 
emphasis. The length of syllables in EngUsh is not fixed and 
unvarying. It is not subject to rule. It frequently changes. 
The rhythmical value of a syllable depends to a considerable 
extent upon the accent which is given to it by the meaning of 
the sentence, or by the structure of the verse, or by both. 



MEMORANDA CV 

A line of English poetry is built of a number of accents, 
recurring at certain intervals, each accent usually carrying with 
it a group of two or more syllables of varying length. The 
simplest and most natural way to measure the line, therefore, 
is not by attributing to it a fixed number of imaginary feet, 
which in the majority of cases it does not contain, but by 
counting the points of accent, which are really the structural 
factors of the verse. 

These points of accent do not always coincide with the 
natural emphasis of the sentence, (though the rhythmical flow 
of the line largely depends upon a preponderance of such 
coincidences). But sometimes the accents are mainly, if not 
altogether, metrical in quality, — that is to say, they arise from 
the fact that the sentence is meant to be read not as prose but 
as verse. The best term to denote such a point of metrical 
emphasis, which may or may not fall upon the same syllable as 
the rhetorical emphasis, is the word stress. 

The clearest, easiest, and shortest way to describe a line of 
Enghsh poetry is not to call it a trimeter or a pentameter or a 
heptameter verse, but a three-stress or a five-stress or a seven- 
stress verse. 

The name to be given to the groups of syllables marked and 
bound together by a stress is more difficult to determine. I will 
confess that it seems to me unnatural and misleading to call 
them feet, when the element of definitely arranged quantities, 
essential to a foot in classical prosody, is wanting, or at least 
uncertain. It appears natural to turn to music for a more accu- 
rate and distinctive name. There is a close analogy between 
the cadence of English verse and the rhythmical structure 
of music. Take away the element of pitch from a musical 
measure and it corresponds very nearly to a verse measure. 
The word bar^ which is used in music to describe a group of 



cvi MEMORANDA 

notes bound together by a strong accent, seems to be an appro- 
priate term to use in verse to describe a group of syllables 
bound together by a stress. At least it is free from some of 
the serious objections which He against the use of the word 
" foot" in English metrics. Therefore, having no better term 
at hand, I shall speak of the syllables which are grouped with 
each metrical stress in a line of verse, as a bar. 

The question still remains, whether it is proper to make any 
use of the terms "trochaic," "iambic," and the like, derived 
from classical prosody, in describing English verse. The ques- 
tion is vigorously debated by the advocates of opposite met- 
rical theories. In the main I agree with the view taken 
by one of the latest and soundest writers upon the subject 
(Professor Raymond M. Alden, of Stanford University, in his 
book on English Ve?'se, 1903), that a "carefully limited use" 
of these terms is both admissible and advisable. 

There is an unmistakable resemblance between the simpler 
rhythms of classical poetry and those which are used in English, 
in one particular, — namely, the order of arrangement of the 
syllables in a structural division. For example, a trochee con- 
sists of a long syllable followed by a short syllable. There is 
an English rhythm" in which the normal verse contains two 
syllables in each bar, the first accented, the second unaccented. 
We may not say that such a verse is composed of trochees, for it 
is not possible to distinguish the syllables, with any regularity, 
as long and short. But the first syllable of the bar is heavy 
and the second is light ; and so we may describe the general 
movement and effect of the verse as trochaic. For example : — 

Love took up the glass of Time and turn'd it in his glowing hands, — 

is an eight-stress trochaic verse, the light syllable of the last 
bar omitted. 



MEMORANDA cvii 

In the same way the movement of English blank verse may 
be justly called iambic, not because it is composed of regular 
iambs, but because the normal stress in each division of the 
verse falls upon the second and final syllable. This gives it an 
effect which resembles that of classical iambics. 

|[' So all day long the noise of battle roll'd 

Among the mountains by the winter sea, — 

is five-stress iambic verse. 

Ring in the valiant man and free, — 

is four-stress iambic verse. 

A metre in which the typical bar is composed of three 

syllables may be called anapcEstic if the stress falls on the last 

""syllable, dactylic if the stress falls on the first syllable. The 

cadence of such metres is distinctly analogous to that produced 

by classical anapaests and dactyls. 

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, — 

is a six-stress dactylic verse, with a variation in the second 
bar, which is trochaic, and the Hght syllables of the last bar 
omitted. 

I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirr'd, — 

is a five-Stress anapaestic verse, with a variation in the last bar, 
which is iambic. 

It seems to me that it is at once simpler and shorter and 
more accurately descriptive to use these classical terms than 
to employ the nomenclature devised by that admirable critic, 
Mr. Robert Bridges {Milton's Prosody) : "dissyllabic rising 
rhythm, dissyllabic falling rhythm, trisyllabic rising rhythm, 
and trisyllabic falling rhythm." For this reason I shall speak 
of Tennyson's mietres as iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, or 
dactylic, using the words, it must be remembered, not as 



ex MEMORANDA 

Close Rhyme, abba. 

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought 
From out the storied past, and used 
Within the present, but transfused 

Thro' future time by power of thought. 

A Iternate Rhy7ne. a be b. 

I know the way she went 

Home with the maiden posy, 
For her feet have touch'd the meadows 

And left the daisies rosy. 

Interrupted Rhy7ne. a aba. 

O Milan, O the chanting quires. 
The giant windows' blazon'd fires, 

The height, the space, the gloom, the glory ! 
A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! 

In regard to the naming of imperfect rhymes the present 
terminology is most defective. There are no terms to indicate 
the differences between the various kinds and degrees of 
imperfection, some of which are allowable without real injury 
to the verse, while others are positive blemishes. 

For instance, there is a form of tone-agreement which 
includes not only the accented vowel and the letters which 
follow it, but also the letters which precede it. Thus the two 
words which correspond are identical in sound, though they 
maybe different in meaning ; for example, born — borne., fair — 
fare, flower — flour. This complete tone-agreement is admis- 
sible in French verse, and is called rime parfait. English 
critics (without exception, so far as I know) translate this term 
literally and speak of the recurrence of an identical sound as a 
" perfect rhyme." At the same time they all agree that such 
a rhyme is inadmissible in modern English verse. Nothing 



MEMORANDA Cxi 

could be more absurd than to call a rhyme '' perfect " and 
then rule it out. 

We need a new and more accurate name for this kind of 
rhyme. It is merely a repetition of precisely the same sound 
in two words. I suggest that it should be called an echo-rhy7iie. 

An example may be found in Tennyson's "The Daisy " : — 

At Florence too what golden hours, 
In those long galleries, were ours. 

In English verse the effect of echo-rhyme is almost invari- 
ably bad. 

There are four other principal kinds of imperfect rhymes : 
those in which the vowels are right but the consonants do not 
quite agree ; those in which the consonants are right but the 
vowels differ slightly ; those in which both the vowels and 
the consonants fall short of full agreement ; and those in which 
the accent in one or both of the rhyming words is forced. 

An imperfection of the first kind is found in " The Palace of 
Art": — 

And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd 

On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep — all things in order stor'd, 
A haunt of ancient Peace. 

Trees — peace, I propose to call an asso?iant rhyme, because 
the vowel-sounds are identical, but the final consonants are not 
precisely the same. 

An imperfection of the second kind is found in the next 
stanza but one of the same poem : — 

Or the maid-mother by a crucifix. 

In tracts of pasture sunny-warm. 
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx 
Sat smiling, babe in arm. 



cxii MEMORANDA 

I would call warm — arm, an approximate rhyme, because the 
vowel sounds differ a little, though the final consonants agree. 

These two kinds of imperfection in rhyme are not to be 
regarded as grave faults in English verse. They may be 
found in the work of the best poets. In Dryden's "Alex- 
ander's Feast" and Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations 
of ImmortaHty," they stand to the perfect rhymes in the pro- 
portion of about one to seven. In Shelley's " Lines Written 
among the Euganean Hills" the proportion is about one to 
six. Of course, when the proportion rises the effect of the 
verse is marred. A slight defect which is tolerable as an 
exception, becomes intolerable when it is constantly repeated. 

An imperfection of the third kind is a much more serious 
fault. There is one in " The Lady of Shalott " : — 

From the bank and from the river 
He flash'd into the crystal mirror. 

I would call river — fnirror, 2. false rhyme, because there is a 
want of full agreement both in vowels and in consonants. A 
rhyme of this kind, though it has a certain resemblance of 
tones, produces a distinctly unpleasant impression on a sensi- 
tive ear, and must be regarded not merely as an irregularity, 
but as a distinct blemish in English verse. 

An imperfection of the fourth kind is found in " A Dream 
of Fair Women" (11. 22-24), where sanctuaries — palaces is 
offered as a rhyme. In order to produce any resemblance of 
tones a forced accent must be thrown on the last syllable of 
each word. The effect is feeble and halting. I would call 
this a la7?ie rhyme. 

Three other common terms are used which need a briel 
definition. In blank verse, an end-stopped line is one at the close 
of which the reader naturally makes a pause, however slight. 



MEMORANDA cxiii 

This is usually, but not always, indicated by a punctuation 
mark. A ru7i-on line is one in which the sense carries the 
voice over, without any pause, into the following line. Take 
the following passage from " Morte d' Arthur " : — 

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, 
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged 
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword, 
And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand 
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, 
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, 
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, 
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
By night, with noises of the northern sea. 

Lines i, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 are end-stopped; lines 2, 4, 8 are run-on. 

Overflow is used to describe the continuance of a sentence 
from one stanza into another. 

These few explanations will be sufficient to make the meaning 
of the technical terms which are used in this book clear enough 
for all practical purposes. They are applied in the notes, and 
in "A Tentative Classification of the Metres of Tennyson" 
which has been prepared by Mr. Chambers and printed at the 
end of this volume. It remains only to sum them up in the 
form of a very short glossary. 

Metrical Structure 

Stress : the accent marking the rhythm of a verse. 
Bar : a group of syllables bound together by a stress. 
Iambic : having the stress on the last of two syllables. 
AnapcEstic : having the stress on the last of three syllables. 
Trochaic : having the stress on the first of two syllables. 
Dactylic : having the stress on the first of three syllables. 
End-stopped : having a natural pause at the close of the line. 
Rtin-on : having no natural pause at the close of the line. 
Overflow: the continuance of a sentence from one stanza to the next. 



cxiv MEMORANDA 

Rhyme 

Alliteratio7i : agreement of initial letters. 

Asso7iance : agreement of accented vowel-sounds. 

Rhyjne : agreement of accented vowels (not initials) and the fol- 
lowing letters or syllables, at the end of lines. 

Leonine rhyme : the same agreement within lines. 

Feininine rhyme : a rhyme of two or more syllables. 

Assona7it rhyme: one in which the vowels agree but not the 
consonants. 

Approximate rhy?ne : one in which the consonants agree but not 
the vowels. 

False rhyme : one in which neither the consonants nor the vowels 
quite agree. 

Echo-rhyme : one in which the second word repeats precisely the 
sound of the first. 

Lame rhyme : one which is made by putting an unnatural accent 
on a word. 

A LIST OF BOOKS USEFUL IN THE STUDY OF 
ENGLISH METRE i 

1. A History of English Rhy thins. By Edwin Guest. London, ^ 

Pickering, 1838. 2 vols. | 

2. Chapters on English Metre. By Joseph B. Mayor. (2d ed.) 

Cambridge, University Press, 1901. 

3. Englische Metrik. Von Dr. J. Schipper. Bonn, Verlag von 

Emil Strauss, 1881. 

4. Milt07i's Prosody. By Robert Bridges. Classical Metres in 

Efiglish Verse. By William Johnson Stone. Oxford, 
Frowde, 1901. 

5. A Handbook bf Poetics. By Francis B. Gummere. Boston, 

Ginn & Company, 1892. 

1 Since writing the fore-going memorandum I have found an interesting and 
admirable pamphlet on English Verse-Structure. By T. S. Omond. Edinburgh, 
David Douglas, 1897. 



MEMORANDA Cxv 

6. English Verse. By Raymond M.Alden. New York, Holt, 1903. 

7. The Science of English Verse. By Sidney Lanier. New York, 

Scribners, 1886. 

8. The Musical Basis of Verse. By J. P. Dabney. New York, 

Longmans, 1901. 

9. An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry. 

By Mark H. Liddell. New York, Doubleday, 1902. 
10. The Rationale of Verse. By Edgar Allan Poe. Complete 

Works of Poe, vol. xiv. New York, Crowell, 1902. 
\\. A Primer of English Verse. By Hiram Corson. Boston, 
Ginn & Company, 1892. 

IL A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

I. The Published Works and Collected Editions of Tennyson 

Privately printed volumes are not included in this list, and only those col- 
lected editions are mentioned which are of textual value. 

1827. Poems by Two Brothers. London: Printed for W. Simpkin 
and R. Marshall, Stationers'-Hall-Court ; and J. &. J. Jack- 
son, Louth. MDCCCXXVii. Crown 8vo, pp. xii, 228. 

1829. TiMBUCTOo. A poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at 

the Cambridge Commencement, mdcccxxix. By A. Tennyson, 
of Trinity College. (Printed in " Prolusiones Academicce : 
MDCCCXXIX. Cantabrigiae : typis academicis excudit Joannes 
Smith." pp. 41.) 

1830. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson. London : 

Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill. 1830. i2mo, 
pp. 154, and leaf of errata. 
1832. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. London : Edward Moxon, 64 
New Bond Street, mdcccxxxiii. i2mo, pp. 163. 

1842. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. In two volumes. London : 

Edward Moxon, Dover Street, mdcccxlii. 2 vols. i2mo, 
pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. 

1843. Poems. Second Edition. London : Edward Moxon. mdcccxliii. 

2 vols. i2mo, pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. 
1845, Poems. Third Edition. London : Edward Moxon. mdcccxlv. 
2 vols. i2mo, pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. 



cxvi MEMORANDA 

1846. Poems. Fourth Edition. London : Edward Moxon. mdcccxlvi. 

2 vols. i2mo, pp. vii, 232 ; vii, 235. 

1847. The Princess: A Medley. By Alfred Tennyson. London: 

Edward Moxon, Dover Street, mdcccxlvii. i2mo, pp. 164. 
Second Edition, 1848; pp. 164. Third Edition, 1850; 
pp. 177. Fourth Edition, 1851 ; pp. 182. Fifth Edition^ 
1853; pp. 183. 

1848. Poems. Fifth Edition. London : Edward Moxon. mdcccxlviii. 

(i vol.) i2mo, pp. 372. 

1850. In Memoriam. London : Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 

MDCCCL. i2mo, pp. vii, 210. 

Second and Third Editions, 1850; pp. vii, 210. Fourth 
Edition, 1851 ; pp. vii, 211. 
Poems. Sixth Edition. London : Edward Moxon. mdcccl. 
i2mo, pp. 374. 

1 85 1. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Seventh Edition. 

London: Edward Moxon. 1851. i2mo, pp. 375. 

1852. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. By 

Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London : Edward Moxon, 
Dover Street. 1852. 8vo, pamphlet, pp. 16. 
Second Edition, 1853. 8vo, pamphlet, pp. 16. 

1853. Poems. Eighth Edition. London: Edward Moxon. 1853. 

i2mo, pp. 379. 

1855. Maud, and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet 
Laureate. London : Edward Moxon. 1855. i2mo, pp. 154. 
Second Edition, 1856; pp. 164. 

1857. Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London: 
Edward Moxon. 1857. Royal8vo, pp. xiii, 375. [With engrav- 
ing of bust by Woolner, and illustrations by Thomas Cres- 
wick, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, William 
Macready, John Calcott Horsley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise.] 

1859. Idylls of the King. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet 
Laureate. London : Edward Moxon & Co., DoVer Street. 
1859. i2mo, pp. 261. 
Second Edition, 1862. 

1864. Enoch Arden, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Lau- 
reate. London: Edward Moxon & Co., Dover Street. 1864. 
i2mo, pp. 178. 



MEMORANDA cxvii 

1865. A Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., 
Poet Laureate. (Moxon's Miniature Poets.) London : Edward 
Moxon & Co., Dover Street. 1865. i6mo, pp. 256. 

1869. The Holy Grail, and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson, 

D.C.L., Poet Laureate, Strahan & Co., Publishers, 56, Lud- 
gate Hill, London. 1870. i2mo, pp. 222. 

1870. The Window, or. The Song of the Wrens. Words written 

for music by Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate : the music by 
Arthur Sullivan. Strahan & Co., Publishers, 56, Ludgate 
Hill. London. 187 1. 

1871. The Miniature or Cabinet Edition of the Complete Poetical 

Works of Alfred Tennyson. Printed by Whittingham, at the 
Chiswick Press. London: Strahan & Co. 1871. 10 vols. 

1872. Gareth and Lynette, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., 

Poet Laureate. Strahan &. Co., 56, Ludgate Hill, London. 

1872. i2mo, pp. 136. 

1872-1873. The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. 
Strahan & Co., Publishers, 56, Ludgate Hill, London. 1872- 

1873. 7 vols. Large 8vo. [The Library Edition.] 
1S74-1877. The Cabinet Edition of the Works of Alfred Tennyson. 

London: Henry S. King & Co. 1874-1877. 12 vols. 8vo. 

1875. Queen Mary. A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. London: 

Henry S. King & Co. 1875. i2mo, pp. viii, 278. 
1875-1877. The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson. London: 
Henry S. King & Co. 1875-1877. 6 vols. Crown 8vo. 
[The Author's Edition.] 

1876. Harold. A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Henry 

S. King & Co. 1877. i2mo, pp. viii, 161. 

1877. The Miniature Edition of the Works of Alfred Tennyson. 

London: Henry S. King & Co. 1877. 13 vols. 32mo. 

1879. The Lover's Tale. By Alfred Tennyson. London : C. Kegan 

Paul & Co., I Paternoster Square. 1879. i2mo, pp. 95. 

1880. Ballads, AND Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. London: 

C. Kegan Paul & Co., i Paternoster Square. 1880. i2mo, 
pp. vi, 184. 
1884. The Cup and The Falcon. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet 
Laureate. London: Macmillan & Co. 1884. i2mo, pp. 146. 
Becket. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London: 
Macmillan & Co. 1884. Crown 8vo, pp. 213. 



cxviii MEMORANDA 

The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London : 
Macmillan & Co. 1884. i vol. Globe 8vo. [The Globe Edi- 
tion. Printed in January 1884. Reprinted, with slight correc- 
tions, April 1884. Repruited, with slight alterations, December 
1886. Reprinted with many additions February 1889. Com- 
plete Edition with additions, January 1893. New Edition, 
April 1898. New Edition with additions, August 1901.] 

1885. TiRESiAS, AND Other Poems. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 

D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London: Macmillan & Co. 1885. 
i2mo, pp. viii, 204. 

1886. A NEW Library Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred, 

Lord Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London: Macmillan 
& Co. 1886. ID vols. 8vo. 
LocKSLEY Hall Sixty Years After, etc. By Alfred, Lord 
Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London and New York : 
Macmillan & Co. 1886. i2mo, pp. 201. 
1889. Demeter, and Other Poems. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, P.L., 
D.C.L. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1889. 
i2mo, pp. vi, 175. 

1892. The Foresters : Robin Hood and Maid Marian. By Alfred, 

Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. New York and London: 
Macmillan & Co. 1892. i2mo, pp. 155. 
The Death of CEnone, Akbar's Dream, and other Poems. 
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. New York and 
London: Macmillan & Co. 1892. i2mo, pp. vi, 113. 

1893. Poems by Two Brothers. ' Haec nos novimus esse nihil.' — 

Martial. New York and London: Macmillan & Co. 1893. 
i6mo, pp. XX, 251. (Preface by Hallam, Lord Tennyson.) 
The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. New 
York and London : Macmillan & Co. 1893. 10 vols. 8vo. 



2. General Criticism 

Among works in the general criticism of Tennyson's poetry the 
following may be mentioned : A Study of the Works of Tennyson, by 
Edward C. Tainsh (Chapman & Hall, 1868. Macmillan, 1893). The 
Poetry of Tennyson, by Henry van Dyke (New York : Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 1889. Tenth Edition : 1898). Tennyson : His Art and Relation 
to Modern Life, by Stopford A. Brooke (Isbister, 1894). Tennyson: A 



MEMORANDA cxix 

Critical Study, by Stephen Gwynn (Blackie). A Tennyson Primer, by 
William M. Dixon (Dodd, Mead & Co.). 

The Mind of lennyson, by E. H. Sneath (Scribners).is a philosophical 
interpretation. Illustrations of Tennyson, by J. Churton Collins (Chatto 
& Windus), deals with the poet's relation to his sources. Tennysoniaiia 
and The Bibliography of Tennyson, by R. H, Shepherd, are full of 
textual and bibliographical material. A Bibliography of the Works of 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Luther S. Livingston (Dodd, Mead & Co.) 
is the most complete record of the first editions. A Concorda^ice to the 
Works, fairly complete to date, was published by D. Barron Brightwell, 
in 1869 (Moxon). 

3. Critical Works on Special Poems 

Of the many books on particular poems, commentaries, analyses, 
etc., the following are noteworthy : — 

On The Princess : A Study of the Princess, by S. E. Dawson (Mont- 
real, Dawson Bros.). 

On Maud: Tennyson's ^ Maud' Vindicated, by Dr. R. J. Mann 
(Jarrold). 

On In Memoriam : Analysis of Mr. Tennyson's ^In Memoriatn' by 
Rev. F. W. Robertson (Kegan Paul). A Key to ^In Memoriain' by 
Alfred Gatty (Bell) ; this was revised by Tennyson himself. Tennyson's 
In Metnoriam : its Purpose and Structure, by John F. Genung (Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co.). Prolegomena to Itt Memoriam, by Thomas Davidson 
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.). Tennyson and '■'■In Memoriam," by Joseph 
Jacobs (Nutt). A Companioft to In Memoriam, by Mrs. E. R. Chap- 
man (Macmillan) ; this was considered the best commentary by Tenny- 
son. A Critical Study of In Memoria??!, by John M. King (Toronto, 
George N. Morang). A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoj-iam, by 
A. C. Bradley (Macmillan). The student will probably find the books 
by Professor Genung and Professor Bradley most helpful. 

On Idylls of the King: Studies in the Idylls, by Henry Elsdale 
(Kegan Paul). Essays on Teitny son's Idylls of the King, by Harold 
Littledale (Macmillan). Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Arthurian 
Story, by M. W. Maccallum (MacLehose). Teiinyson's Konigsidylle 
The Coming of Arthur und ihre Quellen, by Dr. Wiillenweber (Mar- 
burg, 1889). Die Sprache in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, by George 
Thistlethwaite (Halle, 1896). General works to be consulted are The 
Arthurian Legend, by John Rhys (Clarendon Press), and Studies in the 



cxx MEMORANDA 

Legend of the Holy Grail, by Alfred Nutt (D. Nutt). The Growth of 
the Idylls of the King, by Richard Jones (Lippincott), and the chapter 
entitled " The Building of the Idylls," in Literary Anecdotes of the Nine- 
teenth Century, edited by W. R. Nicoll and T. J. Wise, are contributions 
to the study of the text and the historical development of these poems. 

4. Annotated Editions of the Poems 

The poems not covered by copyright have been edited, with intro- 
ductions and notes, by Eugene Parsons in The Farringford Edition 
(10 vols., Crowell), and by William J. Rolfe in The Cambridge Edition 
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.). The latter editor has brought out also The 
Princess, Select Poejns of Tennyson, The Young People's Tennyso7i, Enoch 
Arden and Other Poems, Idylls of the King (2 vols.), and In Memoriam. 
Lyrical Poems of Lord Tennyson, by F. T. Palgrave (Macmillan), and 
Tennyson for the Young, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger (Macmillan), had 
the advantage of the poet's own interest and oversight. The Macmillan 
Co. also publish Lyric Poems of Tenjtyson, by Ernest Rhys ; Selections 
from Tennyson, by F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb ; The Coming of Arthur, 
and The Passing of Arthur and Lancelot and Elaine, by F. J. Rowe ; 
Enoch Arden and Aylmer's Field, by W. T. Webb ; Gareth and Lynette, 
Geraiftt and Enid, The Holy Grail, and Guinevere, by G. C. Macaulay. 
Effingham, Maynard, & Co., publish The Two Voices, etc., by Hiram 
Corson, and Enoch Arden, etc., by Alfred J. Blaisdell. Longmans, 
Green, & Co. publish Gareth atid Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, and The 
Passing of Arthur, by S. C. Hart. In Memoriam has been well edited 
by H. C. Beeching (Macmillan). The best editions of The Princess 2ixe 
those by P. M. Wallace (Macmillan), G. E. Woodbury (Longmans), and 
A. S. Cook (Ginn). In the Temple Classics Series The Princess, In 
Memoriam, and Maud have been edited by Israel Gollancz. The Early 
Poems of Tennyson and In Meynoriam, The Princess, and Maud, edited 
by J. C. Collins, contain elaborate studies of the text ; the former volume 
is, however, full of inaccuracies. 

5. Biographical Material 

The main source of biographical information is Alfred Lord Tejinysojt : 
A Memoir, by his Son, in 2 vols. (Macmillan & Co., 1897). Some addi- 
tional matter may be found in Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning, 
by Anne Ritchie (Harper & Bros.), Memories of the Tennysons, by 



MEMORANDA cxxi 

the Rev. H. D. Rawnsley (MacLehose), and Glimpses of Tcnnyso7t, by 
Agnes Grace Weld (Scribners) ; also in the followmg magazine articles : 
" Aspects of Tennyson, II, A Personal Reminiscence," by James 
Knowles, in The Nineteenth Century, January 1893; "Recollections of 
Tennyson," by J. A, Symonds, in The Century Magazine, May 1893; 
"Talks with Tennyson," by Wilfrid Ward, in The New Review, July 
1896; "Personal Recollections of Tennyson," by W. Gordon McCabe, 
in The Century Magazitie, March 1902. No excellent short life has yet 
been published. The following may be mentioned: Lord Temiyson: 
A Biographical Sketch, by Henry J. Jennings (Chatto & Windus) ; 
Alfred, Lord Tennysofi, by Arthur Waugh (Macmillan) ; Alfred Tenny- 
son, by Andrew Lang (Modern English Writers Series. Dodd, Mead 
& Co.) ; Tennyson, by Sir Alfred Lyall (English Men of Letters Series. 
Macmillan). The Laureate's Country, by Alfred J. Church (Seeley 
& Co.), and Homes and Haunts of Tennyson, by George G. Napier 
(MacLehose) describe the English locaUties mentioned in the poems. 

6. Essays 

The essays here enumerated have been selected from a vast storehouse 
of material. Some of them are criticisms of his peculiar work ; some 
attempt to define his relation to the other great poets of the Victorian 
Era. By James Spedding (in Reviews and Discussions) ; George Brimley 
(in Cambridge Essays) ; Peter Bayne (in Lessons from my Masters) ; 
W. E. Gladstone (in Gleanings of Past Years, Vol. II) ; Charles Kingsley 
(in Literary and General Essays) ; Walter Bagehot (" Wordsworth, 
Tennyson, and Browning," in Literary Studies, Vol. II) ; Bayard Taylor 
(in Critical Essays) ; E. C. Stedman (in Victorian Poets) ; H. A. Taine 
(in Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise) ; A. C. Swinburne (" Tennyson 
and Musset," in Miscellanies) ; George Saintsbury (in Corrected Lmpres- 
sions) ; R. H. Hutton (in Literary Essays) ; Edward Dowden (" Mr. 
Tennyson and Mr. Browning," in Studies in Literature) ; R. C. Jebb 
(in Ward's English Poets, Vol. IV). The essays by Stedman, Dowden, 
and Hutton are perhaps the most adequate. 

The following are among the most important and interesting of the 
magazine articles : A. H. Hallam's enthusiastic review of Poems, Chiefly 
Lyrical, in The Englishman's Magazine, August 1831 (reprinted in full 
in Le Gallienne's edition of Hallam's poems). Christopher North's 
(Prof. John Wilson's) facetious review of the same volume in Black- 
wood's Magazine, May 1832. The scathing review of the Poems of 



cxxii MEMORANDA 

1833, generally attributed to John Gibson Lockhart, in The Quarterly 
Review, July 1833. The favourable review of the same volume by John 
Stuart Mill, in The Westminster Review, July 1835. Reviews of the 
1842 volumes by Richard Monckton Milnes, in The Westminster Review, 
October 1842, and by John Sterling in The Quarterly, September 1842. 
Reviews of The Princess by Prof. James Hadley, in The New Englatider, 
May 1849, ^^d by Aubrey de Vere in 77/1? Edinburgh Review, October 
1849. Reviews of Idylls of the Kiitg by Coventry Patmore, in The 
Edinburgh Review, July 1859, and by Henry Alford, in The Contempo- 
rary Review, January 1870. (The latter contains an inteipretation of 
the allegory of the Idylls, evidently inspired by suggestions from the 
poet.) "Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson," by C. C. Everett, in 
The North American Review, January i860. "A Study of Tennyson," 
by R. H. Stoddard, in The North American Review, July 1881. "The 
Poetry of Tennyson," by Roden Noel, in The Contempoi-ary Review, 
February 1885. "Tennyson as Prophet," by F. W. H. Myers, in The 
Nineteenth Century, March 1889. The series of articles called "Aspects 
of Tennyson," by H. D. Traill, Herbert Paul, Theodore Watts, etc., in 
The Nineteenth Cejttury, 1 892-1 893. " Tennyson and Virgil," by Wilfred 
P. Mustard, in the American Journal of Philology, XX, 2, and " Tenny- 
son and Homer," in the same periodical, XXI, 2. 



POEMS OF TENNYSON 



I 

MELODIES AND PICTURES 

CLARIBEL 

A MELODY 
I 

Where Claribel low-lieth 
The breezes pause and die, 
Letting the rose-leaves fall : 
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth, 
Thick-leaved, ambrosial. 
With an ancient melody 
Of an inward agony. 
Where Claribel low-lieth. 

II 
At eve the beetle boometh 

Athwart the thicket lone : 
At noon the wild bee hummeth 

About the moss'd headstone : 
At midnight the moon cometh. 

And looketh down alone. 
Her song the lintwhite swelleth, 
The clear- voiced mavis dwelleth, 

The callow throstle lispeth. 
The slumbrous wave outwelleth, 

The babbling runnel crispeth, 
The hollow grot repHeth 

Where Claribel low-lieth. 
3 



MELODIES AND PICTURES 



SONG 



A SPIRIT haunts the year's last hours 
DwelHng amid these yellowing bowers : 

To himself he talks ; 
For at eventide, listening earnestly, 
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh 

In the walks; 

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks 
Of the mouldering flowers : 

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower 

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly ; 
Heavily hangs the hollyhock, 

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily. 



The air is damp, and hush'd, and close. 

As a sick man's room when he taketh repose 

An hour before death; 15 

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves 
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves. 

And the breath 

Of the fading edges of box beneath. 
And the year's last rose. 20 

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower 

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; 
Heavily hangs the hollyhock, 

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily. 



THE THROSTLE 



THE THROSTLE 

'Summer is coming, summer is coming. 

I know it, I know it, 1 know it. 
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,* 

Yes, my wild little Poet. 

Sing the new year in under the blue. 5 

Last year you sang it as gladly. 

* New, new, new, new ! ' Is it then so new 

That you should carol so madly? 

*Love again, song again, nest again, young again,' 

Never a prophet so crazy ! 10 

And hardly a daisy as yet, little friend, 
See, there is hardly a daisy. 

* Here again, here, here, here, happy year ! ' 

O warble unchidden, unbidden ! 
Summer is coming, is coming, my dear, 15 

And all the winters are hidden. 



FAR — FAR — AWAY 

(for music) 

What sight so lured him thro' the fields he knew 
As where earth's green stole into heaven's own hue. 

Far — far — away ? 

What sound was dearest in his native dells? 
The mellow Hn-lan-lone of evening bells 

Far — far — away. 



MELODIES AND PICTURES 

What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy, 
Thro' those three words would haunt him when a boy. 

Far — far — away ? 

A whisper from his dawn of Hfe? a breath 
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death 

Far — far — away ? 

Far, far, how far? from o'er the gates of Birth, 
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth, 

Far — far — away ? 

What charm in words, a charm no words could give? 
O dying words, can Music make you Hve 

Far — far — away ? 



'MOVE EASTWARD, HAPPY EARTH" 

Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 
Yon orange sunset waning slow : 

From fringes of the faded eve, 
O, happy planet, eastward go ; 

Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
Thy silver sister-world, and rise 
To glass herself in dewy eyes 

That watch me from the glen below. 

Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne. 
Dip forward under starry light. 

And move me to my marriage-morn, 
And round again to happy night. 



THE SNOWDROP 

THE SNOWDROP 

Many, many welcomes 
February fair-maid, 
Ever as of old time. 
Solitary firstling, 
Coming in the cold time. 
Prophet of the gay time, 
Prophet of the May time, 
Prophet of the roses. 
Many, many welcomes 
February fair-maid ! 



A FAREWELL 

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, 

Thy tribute wave deliver : 
No more by thee my steps shall be. 

For ever and for ever. 

Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea, 5 

A rivulet, then a river : 
No where by thee my steps shall be, 

For ever and for ever. 

But here will sigh thine alder tree, 

And here thine aspen shiver; 10 

And here by thee will hum the bee. 

For ever and for ever. 

A thousand suns will stream on thee, 

A thousand moons will quiver ; 
But not by thee my steps shall be, 15 

For ever and for ever. 



MELODIES AND PICTURES 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 

The Little Grave 

As thro' the land at eve we went, 

And pluck'd the ripen'd ears, 
We fell out, my wife and I, 
O we fell out I know not why, 

And kiss'd again with tears. 
And blessings on the falling out 

That all the more endears. 
When we fall out with those we love 

And kiss again with tears ! 
For when we came where lies the child 

We lost in other years, 
There above the little grave, 
O there above the little grave, 

We kiss'd again with tears. 



''^ Sweet and low " 

Sweet and low, sweet and low, 

Wind of the western sea, 
Low, low, breathe and blow. 

Wind of the western sea ! 
Over the rolling waters go. 
Come from the dying moon, and blow, 

Blow him again to me ; 
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 9 

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, 

Father will come to thee soon; 10 

Rest, rest, on mother's breast, 

Father will come to thee soon ; 
Father will come to his babe in the nest, 
Silver sails all out of the west 

Under the silver moon : 15 

Sleep, my Uttle one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. 



The Bugle Song 

The splendour falls on castle walls 

And snowy summits old in story : 
The long light shakes across the lakes. 
And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, '5 

Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 

O hark, O hear ! how thin and clear. 
And thinner, clearer, farther going ! 
O sweet and far from cliff and scar 

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing ! 10 

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying : 
Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 

O love, they die in yon rich sky, 

They faint on hill or field or river : 
Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 15 

And grow for ever and for ever. 
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying. 
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. 



lO MELODIES AND PICTURES 

The Battle 

Thy voice is heard thro' rolHng drums, 

That beat to battle where he stands; 
Thy face across his fancy comes, 

And gives the battle to his hands : 
A moment, while the trumpets blow, 

He sees his brood about thy knee ; 
The next, like fire he meets the foe, 

And strikes him dead for thine and thee. 



^^ Sweet my child, I live for thee"" 

Home they brought her warrior dead : 
She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry : 

All her maidens, watching, said, 
' She must weep or she will die.' 

Then they praised him, soft and low, 
Call'd him worthy to be loved. 

Truest friend and noblest foe ; 

Yet she neither spoke nor moved. 

Stole a maiden from her place, 
Lightly to the warrior stept, 

Took the face-cloth from the face ; 
Yet she neither moved nor wept. 

Rose a nurse of ninety years. 
Set his child upon her knee — 

Like summer tempest came her tears — 
'Sweet my child, I live for thee.' 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS li 

^'■Ask me no more^^ 

Ask me no more : the moon may draw the sea ; 

The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape 
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape ; 

But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee? 

Ask me no more. 5 

Ask me no more : what answer should I give ? 
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye : 
Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die ! 

Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live ; 

Ask me no more. 10 

Ask me no more : thy fate and mine are seal'd : 
I strove against the stream and all in vain : 
Let the great river take me to the main : 

No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield ; 

Ask me no more. 15 



^^ Tears, idle tears ^' 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, 
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more. 

Fresh as the first beam gUttering on a sail. 
That brings our friends up from the underworld, 
Sad as the last which reddens over one 
That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 



12 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 

Dear as remember'd kisses after death, 
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd 
On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
O Death in Life, the days that are no more. 



The Swallow's Message 

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, 
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves. 
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee. 

O tell her. Swallow, thou that knowest each, 
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, 
And dark and true and tender is the North. 

O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light 
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill, 
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves. 

O were I thou that she might take me in. 
And lay me on her bosom, and her heart 
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died. 

Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love. 
Delaying as the tender ash delays 
To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 13 

O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown : 
Say to her, I do but wanton in the South, 
But in the North long since my nest is made. 

O tell her, brief is life but love is long, 
And brief the sun of summer in the North, 
And brief the moon of beauty in the South. 

O Swallow, flying from the golden woods. 
Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine. 
And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee. 



Serenade 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ; 
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font : 
The fire-fly wakens : waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, 5 

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, 
And all thy heart hes open unto me. 

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 10 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up. 
And slips into the bosom of the lake : 
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 
Into my bosom and be lost in me. 



14 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

A Small Sweet Idyl 

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height : 
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang) 
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills? 
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease 
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine, 5 

To sit a star upon the sparkling spire ; 
And come, for Love is of the valley, come, 
For Love is of the valley, come thou down 
And find him ; by the happy threshold, he. 
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, 10 

Or red with spirted purple of the vats, 
Or foxHke in the vine ; nor cares to walk 
With Death and Morning on the silver horns. 
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine, 
Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice, 15 

That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls 
To roll the torrent out of dusky doors : 
But follow ; let the torrent dance thee down 
To find him in the valley ; let the wild 
Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave 20 

The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill 
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke. 
That like a broken purpose waste in air : 
So waste not thou ; but come ; for all the vales 
Await thee ; azure pillars of the hearth 25 

Arise to thee ; the children call, and I 
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound, 
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet ; 
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, 
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 30 

And murmuring of innumerable bees. 



THE SONG OF THE BROOK 15 



SONGS FROM OTHER POEMS 

THE SONG OF THE BROOK 
(From The Brook) 

I COME from haunts of coot and hern, 

I make a sudden sally, 
And sparkle out among the fern, 

To bicker down a valley. 

By thirty hills I hurry down, 
Or slip between the ridges, 

By twenty thorps, a little town, 
And half a hundred bridges. 

Till last by Philip's farm I flow 
To join the brimming river. 

For men may come and men may go, 
But I go on for ever. 

I chatter over stony ways. 
In httle sharps and trebles, 

I bubble into eddying bays, 
I babble on the pebbles. 

With many a curve my banks I fret 
By many a field and fallow, 

And many a fairy foreland set 
With willow-weed and mallow. 



l6 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

I chatter, chatter, as I flow 

To join the brimming river. 
For men may come and men may go, 

But I go on for ever. 

I wind about, and in and out, 25 

With here a blossom sailing. 
And here and there a lusty trout, 

And here and there a grayling, 

And here and there a foamy flake 

Upon me, as I travel 30 

With many a silvery waterbreak 

Above the golden gravel. 

And draw them all along, and flow 

To join the brimming river, 
For men may come and men may go, 35 

But I go on for ever. 

I steal by lawns and grassy plots, 

I slide by hazel covers ; 
I move the sweet forget-me-nots 

That grow for happy lovers. 40 

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, 

Among my skimming swallows ; 
I make the netted sunbeam dance 

Against my sandy shallows. 

I murmur under moon and stars 45 

In brambly wildernesses; 
I linger by my shingly bars; 

I loiter round my cresses ; 



CRADLE-SONG 17 

And out again I curve and flow 

To join the brimming river, 50 

For men may come and men may go, 

But I go on for ever. 



CRADLE-SONG 
(From Sea Dreams) 

What does little birdie say 
In her nest at peep of day? 
Let me fly, says little birdie, 
Mother, let me fly away. 
Birdie, rest a litde longer, 
Till the little wings are stronger. 
So she rests a little longer, 
Then she flies away. 

What does Httle baby say. 
In her bed at peep of day? 
Baby says, like little birdie, 
Let me rise and fly away. 
Baby, sleep a little longer. 
Till the little limbs are stronger. 
If she sleeps a little longer, 
Baby too shall fly away. 



l8 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

MOTHER-SONG 
(From Rornney's Remorse) 

Beat upon mine, little heart ! beat, beat ! 

Beat upon mine ! you are mine, my sweet ! 

All mine from your pretty blue eyes to your feet, 

My sweet. 

Sleep, little blossom, my honey, my bliss ! 
For I give you this, and I give you this ! 
And I blind your pretty blue eyes with a kiss ! 

Sleep ! 

Father and Mother will watch you grow. 
And gather the roses whenever they blow, 
And find the white heather wherever you go, 

My sweet. 

ENID'S SONG 
(From The Marriage of Geraint) 

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud ; 
Turn thy wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm, and cloud ; 
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. 

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown ; 
With that wild wheel we go not up or down; 
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. 

Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands ; 
Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands ; 
For man is man and master of his fate. 

Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd ; 
Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud ; 
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. 



VIVIEN'S SONG 19 

VIVIEN'S SONG 
(From Merlin and Vivien) 

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours. 
Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers : 
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. 

It is the little rift within the lute. 
That by and by will make the music mute. 
And ever widening slowly silence all. 

The little rift within the lover's lute 
Or Httle pitted speck in garner'd fruit, 
That rotting inward slowly moulders all. 

It is not worth the keeping : let it go : 
But shall it? answer, darhng, answer, no. 
And trust me not at all or all in all. 



ELAINE'S SONQ 

(From Lancelot and Elaine) 

Sweet is true love tho' given in vain, in vain ; 
And sweet is death who puts an end to pain : 
I know not which is sweeter, no, not I. 

Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be : 
Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me. 

Love, if death be sweeter, let me die. 

Sweet love, that seems not made to fade away. 
Sweet death, that seems to make us loveless clay, 

1 know not which is sweeter, no, not I. 



20 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

I fain would follow love, if that could be; 
I needs must follow death, who calls for me; 
Call and I follow, I follow ! let me die. 



MILKING-SONG 
(From Queen Mary, Act III, Scene 5) 

Shame upon you, Robin, 

Shame upon you now ! 
Kiss me would you? with my hands 

Milking the cow? 

Daisies grow again, 5 

Kingcups blow again, 
And you came and kiss'd me milking the cow. 

Robin came behind me, 

Kiss'd me well I vow; 
Cuff him could I? with my hands 10 

Milking the cow? 

Swallows fly again, 

Cuckoos cry again, 
And you came and kiss'd me milking the cow. 

Come, Robin, Robin, 15 

Come and kiss me now ; 
Help it can I? with my hands 

Milking the cow? 

Ringdoves coo again, 

All things woo again. 20 

Come behind and kiss me milking the cow ! 



THE QUEEN'S SONG 21 

THE QUEEN'S SONG 
(From Queen Mary, Act V, Scene 2) 

Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing ! 

Beauty passes Hke a breath and love is lost in loathing : 

Low, my lute ; speak low, my lute, but say the world is nothing — 

Low, lute, low ! 
Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken; 
Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken; 
Low, my lute ! oh low, my lute ! we fade and are forsaken — 

Low, dear lute, low ! 



DUET OF HENRY AND ROSAMUND 
(From Becket, Act II, Scene i) 

1 Is it the wind of the dawn that I hear in the pine overhead ? 

2 No ; but the voice of the deep as it hollows the cliffs of the 

land. 

1 Is there a voice coming up with the voice of the deep from 

the strand. 
One coming up with a song in the flush of the ghmmering red ? 

2 Love that is born of the deep coming up with the sun from 5 

the sea. 

1 Love that can shape or can shatter a Hfe till the Hfe shall 

have fled? 

2 Nay, let us welcome him. Love that can lift up a life from 

the dead. 

1 Keep him away from the lone little isle. Let us be, let us be. 

2 Nay, let him make it his own, let him reign in it — he, it is he, 
Love that is born of the deep coming up with the sun from 10 

the sea. 



22 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

ODE TO MEMORY 



ADDRESSED TO 

I 

Thou who stealest fire, 
From the fountains of the past, 
To glorify the present; oh, haste, 

Visit my low desire ! 
Strengthen me, enlighten me ! 
I faint in this obscurity, 
Thou dewy dawn of memory. 



Come not as thou earnest of late. 
Flinging the gloom of yesternight 
On the white day; but robed in soften'd Hght lo 

Of orient state. 
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist. 

Even as a maid, whose stately brow 
The dew-impearled winds of dawn have kiss'd, 

When she, as thou, ^5 

Stays on her floating locks the lovely freight 
Of overflowing blooms, and earliest shoots 
Of orient green, giving safe pledge of fruits, 
Which in wintertide shall star 
The black earth with brilHance rare. 20 



III 

Whilome thou camest with the morning mist. 

And with the evening cloud. 
Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast 



ODE TO MEMORY 23 

(Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind 

Never grow sere, 25 

When rooted in the garden of the mind, 

Because they are the earhest of the year). 
Nor was the night thy shroud. 
In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest 
Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope. 30 

The eddying of her garments caught from thee 
The Hght of thy great presence ; and the cope 

Of the half-attain'd futurity, 

Tho' deep not fathomless, 
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble 35 

O'er the deep mind of dauntless infancy. 
Small thought was there of life's distress ; 
For sure she deem'd no mist of earth could dull 
Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and beautiful : 
Sure she was nigher to heaven's spheres, 40 

Listening the lordly music flowing from 
The illimitable years. 

strengthen me, enlighten me ! 

1 faint in this obscurity, 

Thou dewy dawn of memory. 45 



IV 

Come forth, I charge thee, arise. 
Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes ! 
Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines 
Unto mine inner eye, 

Divinest Memory ! ' 50 

Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall 
Which ever sounds and shines 

A pillar of white light upon the wall 



24 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Of purple cliffs, aloof descried : 

Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, 55 

The seven elms, the poplars four 

That stand beside my father's door, 

And chiefly from the brook that loves 

To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 60 

Drawing into his narrow earthen urn. 

In every elbow and turn, 
The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland, 

O ! hither lead thy feet ! 
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat 65 

Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 

Upon the ridged wolds, 
When the first matin-song hath waken'd loud 
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn, 

What time the amber morn 7° 

Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud. 



Large dowries doth the raptured eye 
To the young spirit present 
When first she is wed ; 

And like a bride of old 75 

In triumph led, 

With music and sweet showers 
Of festal flowers, 
Unto the dwelling she must sway. 
Well hast thou done, great artist Memory, 80 

In setting round thy first experiment 
With royal frame-work of wrought gold; 



ODE TO MEMORY 25 

Needs must thou dearly love thy first essay, 
And foremost in thy various gallery 

Place it, where sweetest sunlight falls 85 

Upon the storied walls; 

For the discovery 
And newness of thine art so pleased thee. 
That all which thou hast drawn of fairest 

Or boldest since, but lightly weighs 90 

With thee unto the love thou bearest 
The first-born of thy genius. Artist-Hke, 
Ever retiring thou dost gaze 
On the prime labour of thine early days : 
No matter what the sketch might be ; 95 

Whether the high field on the bushless Pike, 
Or even a sand-built ridge 
Of heaped hills that mound the sea. 
Overblown with murmurs harsh. 

Or even a lowly cottage whence we see 100 

Stretch'd wide and wild the waste enormous marsh. 
Where from the frequent bridge. 
Like emblems of infinity, 
The trenched waters run from sky to sky ; 
Or a garden bower'd close 105 

With plaited alleys of the traihng rose, 
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots, 
Or opening upon level plots 
Of crowned liHes, standing near 

Purple-spiked lavender : no 

Whither in after life retired 
From brawling storms, 
From weary wind. 
With youthful fancy re-inspired,- 

We may hold converse with all forms 115 



26 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Of the many-sided mind, 

And those whom passion hath not blinded, 

Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded. 

My friend, with you to li\'e alone, 
Were how much better than to own 
A crown, a sceptre, and a throne ! 

strengthen me, enlighten • me ! 

1 faint in this obscurity. 
Thou dewy dawn of memory. 



THE BEGGAR MAID 

Her arms across her breast she laid ; 

She was more fair than words can say : 
Bare-footed came the beggar maid 

Before the king Cophetua. 
In robe and crown the king stept down, 

To meet and greet her on her way; 
' It is no wonder,' said the lords, 

' She is more beautiful than day.' 

As shines the moon in clouded skies, 

She in her poor attire was seen : 
One praised her ankles, one her eyes. 

One her dark hair and lovesome mien. 
So sweet a face, such angel grace. 

In all that land had never been : 
Cophetua sware a royal oath : 

' This beggar maid shall be my queen ! 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 2/ 

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 

When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free 

In the silken sail of infancy, 

The tide of time flow'd back with me, 

The forward-flowing tide of time ; 
And many a sheeny summer-morn, 5 

Adown the Tigris I was borne, 
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold, 
High-walled gardens green and old ; 
True Mussulman was I and sworn. 

For it was in the golden prime io 

Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Anight my shallop, rustling thro' 

The low and bloomed foliage, drove 

The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove 

The citron-shadows in the blue : 15 

By garden porches on the brim. 

The costly doors flung open wide. 

Gold glittering thro' lamplight dim. 

And broider'd sofas on each side : 

In sooth it was a goodly time, 20 

For it was in the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Often, where clear-stemm'd platans guard 

The outlet, did I turn away 

The boat-head down a broad canal 25 

From the main river sluiced, where all 

The sloping of the moon-lit sward 

Was damask-work, and deep inlay 



28 * MELODIES AND PICTURES 



^ 



Of braided blooms unmown, which crept 

Adown to where the water slept. 30 

A goodly place, a goodly time, 

For it was in the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

A motion from the river won 

Ridged the smooth level, bearing on 35 

My shallop thro' the star-strown calm, 

Until another night in night 

I enter'd, from the clearer light, 

Imbower'd vaults of pillar'd palm, 

Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb 40 

Heavenward, were stay'd beneath the dome 

Of hollow boughs. — A goodly time, 

For it was in the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Still onward ; and the clear canal 45 

Is rounded to as clear a lake. 

From the green rivage many a fall 

Of diamond rillets musical. 

Thro' little crystal arches low 

Down from the central fountain's flow 50 

Fall'n silver-chiming, seemed to shake 

The sparkling flints beneath the prow. 

A goodly place, a goodly time, 

For it was in the golden prime 

Of good Haroun Alraschid. 55 

Above thro' many a bowery turn 
A walk with vary-colour'd shells 
Wander'd engrain'd. On either side 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 29 

All round about the fragrant marge 

From fluted vase, and brazen urn 6c 

In order, eastern flowers large, 

Some dropping low their crimson bells 

Half-closed, and others studded wide 

With disks and tiars, fed the time 

With odour in the golden prime 6$ 

Of good Haroun Alraschid. 



Far off, and where the lemon grove 

In closest coverture upsprung, 

The living airs of middle night 

Died round the bulbul as he sung ; 70 

Not he : but something which possess'd 

The darkness of the world, delight, 

Life, anguish, death, immortal love, 

Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress'd, 

Apart from place, withholding time, 75 

But flattering the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Black the garden-bowers and grots 

Slumber'd : the solemn palms were ranged 

Above, unwoo'd of summer wind : 80 

A sudden splendour from behind 

Flush'd all the leaves with rich gold-green, 

And, flowing rapidly between 

Their interspaces, counterchanged 

The level lake with diamond-plots 85 

Of dark and bright. A lovely time, 

For it was in the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 



30 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Dark-blue the deep sphere overhead, 
Distinct with vivid stars inlaid, 
Grew darker from that under-flame : 
So, leaping lightly from the boat, 
With silver anchor left afloat. 
In marvel whence that glory came 
Upon me, as in sleep I sank 
In cool soft turf upon the bank, 

Entranced with that place and time, 
So worthy of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Thence thro' the garden I was drawn — 
A realm of pleasance, many a mound. 
And many a shadow-chequer' d lawn 
Full of the city's stilly sound, 
And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round 
The stately cedar, tamarisks, 
Thick rosaries of scented thorn, 
Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks 
Graven with emblems of the time. 
In honour of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

With dazed vision unawares 
From the long alley's latticed shade 
Emerged, I came upon the great 
Pavilion of the Caliphat. 
Right to the carven cedarn doors, 
Flung inward over spangled floors, 
Broad-based flights of marble stairs 
Ran up with golden balustrade, 
After the fashion of the time, 
And humour of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 3 1 

The fourscore windows all alight 

As with the quintessence of flame, 

A million tapers flaring bright 

From twisted silvers look'd to shame 125 

The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream'd 

Upon the mooned domes aloof 

In inmost Bagdat, till there seem'd 

Hundreds of crescents on the roof 

Of night new-risen, that marvellous time 130 

To celebrate the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Then stole I up, and trancedly 

Gazed on the Persian girl alone, 

Serene with argent-lidded eyes i35 

Amorous, and lashes like to rays 

Of darkness, and a brow of pearl 

Tressed with redolent ebony, 

In many a dark dehcious curl. 

Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone; 140 

The sweetest lady of the time, 

Well worthy of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid. 

Six columns, three on either side, 

Pure silver, underpropt a rich i45 

Throne of the massive ore, from which 

Down-dr"oop'd, in many a floating fold, 

Engarlanded and diaper'd 

With inwrought flowers, a cloth of gold. 

Thereon, his deep eye laughter-stirr'd 150 

With merriment of kingly pride, 

Sole star of all that place and time, 

I saw him — in his golden prime, 
The Good Haroun Alraschid. 



32 MELODIES AND PICTURES 



THE DAISY 

WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH 

O LOVE, what hours were thine and mine, 
In lands of palm and southern pine ; 

In lands of palm, of orange-blossom, 
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine. 

What Roman strength Turbk show'd 5 

In ruin, by the mountain road ; 

How like a gem, beneath, the city 
Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd. 

How richly down the rocky dell 

The torrent vineyard streaming fell 10 

To meet the sun and sunny waters, 
That only heaved with a summer swell. 

What slender campanili grew 

By bays, the peacock's neck in hue ; 

Where, here and there, on sandy beaches 15 

A milky-bell'd amaryllis blew. 

How young Columbus seem'd to rove, 
Yet present in his natal grove. 

Now watching high on mountain cornice, 
And steering, now, from a purple cove, 20 

Now pacing mute by ocean's rim ; 
Till, in a narrow street and dim, 

I stay'd the wheels at Cogoletto, 
And drank, and loyally drank to him. 



THE DAISY 33 

Nor knew we well what pleased us most, 25 

Not the dipt palm of which they boast ; 

But distant colour, happy hamlet, 
A moulder'd citadel on the coast, 

Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen 

A light amid its olives green ; 30 

Or olive-hoary cape in ocean; 
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine, 

Where oleanders flush'd the bed 
Of silent torrents, gravel-spread ; 

And, crossing, oft we saw the gHsten 35 

Of ice, far up on a mountain head. 

We loved that hall, tho' white and cold. 
Those niched shapes of noble mould, 

A princely people's awful princes. 
The grave, severe Genovese of old. 40 

At Florence too what golden hours, 
In those long galleries, were ours ; 

What drives about the fresh Cascine, 
Or walks in BoboK's ducal bowers. 

In bright vignettes, and each complete, 45 

Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet, 

Or palace, how the city glitter'd. 
Thro' cypress avenues, at our feet. 

But when we crost the Lombard plain 

Remember what a plague of rain; 50 

Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma ; 
At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain. 



34 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

And stern and sad (so rare the smiles 
Of sunlight) look'd the Lombard piles; 

Porch-pillars on the Hon resting, 55 

And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles. 

Milan, O the chanting quires, 
The giant windows' blazon'd fires, 

The height, the space, the gloom, the glory ! 
A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! 60 

1 cHmb'd the roofs at break of day ; 
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay. 

I stood among the silent statues. 
And statued pinnacles, mute as they. 

How faintly-flush'd, how phantom-fair, 65 

Was Monte Rosa, hanging there 

A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys 
And snowy dells in a golden air. 

Remember how we came at last 

To Como ; shower and storm and blast 70 

Had blown the lake beyond his limit, 
And all was flooded ; and how we past 

From Como, when the light was gray. 
And in my head, for half the day, 

The rich Virgilian rustic measure 75 

Of Lari Maxume, all the way. 

Like ballad-burthen music, kept. 
As on the Lariano crept 

To that fair port below the castle 
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept ; 80 



THE DAISY 35 

Or hardly slept, but watch'd awake 
A cypress in the moonlight shake, 
' The moonlight touching o'er a terrace 
One tall Agave above the lake. 

What more? we took our last adieu, 85 

And up the snowy Splugen drew, 

But ere we reach'd the highest summit 
I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you. 

It told of England then to me. 

And now it tells of Italy. 9° 

O love, we two shall go no longer 
To lands of summer across the sea; 

So dear a life your arms enfold 
Whose crying is a cry for gold : 

Yet here to-night in this dark city, 95 

When ill and weary, alone and cold, 

I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry, 
This nurseling of another sky 

Still in the little book you lent me, 
And where you tenderly laid it by : 100 

And I forgot the clouded Forth, 

The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth, 

The bitter east, the misty summer 
And gray metropoHs of the North. 

Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain, 105 

Perchance, to charm a vacant brain. 

Perchance, to dream you still beside me, 
My fancy fled to the South again. 



36 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

EARLY SPRING 



Once more the Heavenly Power 

Makes all things new, 
And domes the red-plow'd hills 

With loving blue ; 
The blackbirds have their wills, 5 

The throstles too. 

II 
Opens a door in Heaven ; 

From skies of glass 
A Jacob's ladder falls 

On greening grass, lo 

And o'er the mountain-walls 

Young angels pass. 

Ill 
Before them fleets the shower. 

And burst the buds. 
And shine the level lands, 15 

And flash the floods; 
The stars are from their hands 

Flung thro' the woods, 

IV 

The woods with living airs 

How softly fann'd, 20 

Light airs from where the deep, 

All down the sand. 
Is breathing in his sleep, 

Heard by the land. 



EARLY SPRING 



37 



O follow, leaping blood, ^5 

The season's lure ! 
O heart, look down and up 

Serene, secure. 
Warm as the crocus cup, 

Like snowdrops, pure ! 



VI 



30 



Past, Future glimpse and fade 

Thro' some slight spell, 
A gleam from yonder vale. 

Some far blue fell, 
And sympathies, how frail, 35 

In sound and smell ! 



VII 

Till at thy chuckled note, 

Thou twinkling bird. 
The fairy fancies range, 

And, lightly stirr'd, 
Ring little bells of change 

From word to word. 

VIII 

For now the Heavenly Power 

Makes all things new. 
And thaws the cold, and fills 45 

The flower with dew; 
The blackbirds have their wills, 

The poets too. 



40 



38 MELODIES AND PICTURES 



THE DYING SWAN 



The plain was grassy, wild and bare, 
Wide, wild, and open to the air, 
Which had built up everywhere 

An under-roof of doleful gray. 
With an inner voice the river ran, 
Adown it floated a dying swan. 
And loudly did lament. 

It was the middle of the day. 
Ever the weary wind went on, 

And took the reed-tops as it went. 



Some blue peaks in the distance rose, 

And white against the cold-white sky,. 

Shone out their crowning snows. 
One willow over the river wept. 

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh ; 1 5 

Above in the wind was the swallow, 
Chasing itself at its own wild will. 
And far thro' the marish green and still 
The tangled water-courses slept. 

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow. 20 



The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul 
Of that waste place with joy 
Hidden in sorrow : at first to the ear 
The warble was low, and full and clear ; 



THE EAGLE 39 

And floating about the under-sky, 25 

Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole 

Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear ; 

But anon her awful jubilant voice, 

With a music strange and manifold, 

Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold ; 30 

As when a mighty people rejoice 

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold, 

And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd 

Thro' the open gates of the city afar, 

To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star. 35 

And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds. 

And the willow-branches hoar and dank. 

And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds. 

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank. 

And the silvery marish-flowers that throng 40 

The desolate creeks and pools among, 

Were flooded over with eddying song. 



THE EAGLE 

FRAGMENT 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands ; 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 
He watches from his mountain walls. 
And like a thunderbolt he falls. 



40 MELODIES AND PICTURES 



THE OAK 

Live thy Life, 

Young and old, 
Like yon oak, 
Bright in spring, 
Living gold ; 

Summer-rich 

Then ; and then 
Autumn-changed, 
Soberer-hued 

Gold again. 

All his leaves 

Fall'n at length, 
Look, he stands. 
Trunk and bough, 

Naked strength. 



THE SEA-FAIRIES 

Slow sail'd the weary mariners and saw, 
Betwixt the green brink and the running foam, 
Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest 
To little harps of gold ; and while they mused 
Whispering to each other half in fear. 
Shrill music reach'd them on the middle sea. 

Whither away, whither away, whither away? fly no more. 
Whither away from the high green field, and the happy 
blossoming shore? 



THE SEA-FAIRIES 4 1 

Day and night to the billow the fountain calls : 

Down shower the gambolling waterfalls lo 

From wandering over the lea : 

Out of the live-green heart of the dells 

They freshen the silvery-crimson shells, 

And thick with white bells the clover-hill swells 

High over the full-toned sea : 15 

O hither, come hither and furl your sails, 

Come hither to me and to me : 

Hither, come hither and frolic and play ; 

Here it is only the mew that wails; 

We will sing to you all the day : 20 

Mariner, mariner, furl your sails, 

For here are the blissful downs and dales, 

And merrily, merrily carol the gales. 

And the spangle dances in bight and bay. 

And the rainbow forms and flies on the land 25 

Over the islands free ; 

And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand ; 

Hither, come hither and see ; 

And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave, 

And sweet is the colour of cove and cave, 30 

And sweet shall your welcome be : 

O hither, come hither, and be our lords, 

For merry brides are we : 

We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words : 

O listen, listen, your eyes shall gUsten 35 

With pleasure and love and jubilee : 

O listen, Hsten, your eyes shall gHsten 

When the sharp clear twang of the golden chords 

Runs up the ridged sea. 

Who can light on as happy a shore 40 

All the world o'er, all the world o'er? 

Whither away ? listen and stay : mariner, mariner, fly no more. 



42 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

THE LOTOS- EATERS 

' Courage ! ' he said, and pointed toward the land, 
'This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.' 
In the afternoon they came unto a land 
In which it seemed always afternoon. 
All round the coast the languid air did swoon, 
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. 
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; 
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream 
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem. 

A land of streams ! some, like a downward smoke, 

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go ; 

And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, 

Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. 

They saw the gleaming river seaward flow 

From the inner land : far off, three mountain-tops, 

Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, 

Stood sunset-flush'd : and, dew'd with showery drops, 

Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse. 

The charmed sunset Knger'd low adown 

In the red West : thro' mountain clefts the da^e 

Was seen far inland, and the yellow down 

Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale 

And meadow, set with slender gaUngale ; 

A land where all things always seem'd the same ! 

And round about the keel with faces pale. 

Dark faces pale against that rosy flame. 

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came. 

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, 
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 43 

To each, but whoso did receive of them, 30 

And taste, to him the gushing of the wave 

Far far away did seem to mourn and rave 

On alien shores ; and if his fellow spake, 

His voice was thin, as voices from the grave ; 

And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, 35 

And music in his ears his beating heart did make. 

They sat them down upon the yellow sand, 

Between the sun and moon upon the shore ; 

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, 

Of child, and wife, and slave ; but evermore 40 

Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar. 

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 

Then some one said, ' We will return no more ; ' 

And all at once they sang, ' Our island home 

Is far beyond the wave ; we will no longer roam.' 45 



CHORIC SONG 



There is sweet music here that softer falls 

Than petals from blown roses on the grass, 

Or night-dews on still waters between walls 

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass ; 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, 50 

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes ; 

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful 

skies. 
Here are cool mosses deep, 
And thro' the moss the ivies creep, 

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, 55 

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep. 



44 MELODIES AND PICTURES 



Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness, 
And utterly consumed with sharp distress, 
While all things else have rest from weariness? 
All things have rest : why should we toil alone, 60 

We only toil, who are the first of things. 
And make perpetual moan. 
Still from one sorrow to another thrown : 
Nor ever fold our wings, 

And cease from wanderings, 65 

Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm ; 
Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, 
' There is no joy but calm ! ' 
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of 
things ? 



Ill 



70 



Lo ! in the middle of the wood, 

The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud 

With winds upon the branch, and there 

Grows green and broad, and takes no care, 

Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon 

Nightly dew-fed ; and turning yellow 75 

Falls, and floats adown the air. 

Lo ! sweeten'd with the summer light, 

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow. 

Drops in a silent autumn night. 

All its allotted length of days, 80 

The flower ripens in its place. 

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, 

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 45 

IV 

Hateful is the dark-blue sky, 

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea. 85 

Death is the end of life ; ah, why- 
Should life all labour be? 
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 
And in a little while our lips are dumb. 
Let us alone. What is it that will last? 90 

All things are taken from us, and become 
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. 
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
To war with evil? Is there any peace 

In ever climbing up the cHmbing wave? 95 

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 
In silence ; ripen, fall and cease : 
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. 



How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, 

With half-shut eyes ever to seem 100 

FalHng asleep in a half-dream ! 

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light. 

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height ; 

To hear each other's whisper'd speech ; 

Eating the Lotos day by day, 105 

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach. 

And tender curving lines of creamy spray ; 

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly 

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy ; 

To muse and brood and live again in memory, no 

With those old faces of our infancy 



46 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Heap'd over with a mound of grass, 

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass ! 



VI 

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, 

And dear the last embraces of our wives 115 

And their warm tears : but all hath suffer'd change : 

For surely now our household hearths are cold : 

Our sons inherit us : our looks are strange : 

And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. 

Or else the island princes over-bold 120 

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings 

Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, 

And our great deeds, as half- forgotten things. 

Is there confusion in the Httle isle? 

Let what is broken so remain. 125 

The Gods are hard to reconcile : 

'Tis hard to settle order once again. 

There is confusion worse than death, 

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain. 

Long labour unto aged breath, 130 

Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars 

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. 



VII 

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly. 

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) 

With half-dropt eyelid still, 135 

Beneath a heaven dark and holy, 

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly 

His waters from the purple hill — 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 47 

To hear the dewy echoes calHng 

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twmed vine — 140 

To watch the emerald-colour'd water falUng 

Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine ! 

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, 

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine. 

VIII 

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak : 145 

The Lotos blows by every winding creek : 

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone : 

Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone 

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is 

blown. 
We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 150 

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was 

seething free, 
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains 

in the sea. 
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind. 
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined 
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. 155 

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd 
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly 

curl'd 
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming 

world : 
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands. 
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps 160 

and fiery sands, 
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and 

praying hands. 



48 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful 

song 
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, 
Like a tale of Uttle meaning tho' the words are strong; 
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, 165 
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, 
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil ; 
Till they perish and they suffer — some, 'tis whisper'd — 

down in hell 
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell. 
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. 170 

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and 

oar; 
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will .not wander more. 



ISABEL 



Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed 
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity. 
Clear, without heat, undying, tended by 

Pure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane 
Of her still spirit ; locks not wide-dispread. 
Madonna-wise on either side her head ; 
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign 
The summer calm of golden charity. 
Were fixed shadows of thy fixed mood, 

Revered Isabel, the crown and head. 
The stately flower of female fortitude. 

Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead. 



ISABEL 49 



The intuitive decision of a bright 
And thorough-edged intellect to part 

Error from crime ; a prudence to withhold ; 1 5 

The laws of marriage character'd in gold 
Upon the blanched tablets of her heart; 
A love still burning upward, giving light 
To read those laws; an accent very low 
In blandishment, but a most silver flow 20 

Of subtle-paced counsel in distress, 
Right to the heart and brain, tho' undescried, 

Winning its way with extreme gentleness 
Thro' all the outworks of suspicious pride ; 
A courage to endure and to obey ; 25 

A hate of gossip parlance, and of sway, 
Crown'd Isabel, thro' all her placid life, 
The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife. 

in 

The mellow'd reflex of a winter moon ; 
A clear stream flowing with a muddy one, 30 

Till in its onward current it absorbs 

With swifter movement and in purer light 

The vexed eddies of its wayward brother : 
A leaning and upbearing parasite. 
Clothing the stem, which else had fallen quite 35 
With cluster'd flower-bells and ambrosial orbs 
Of rich fruit-bunches leaning on each other — 
Shadow forth thee : — the world hath not another 
(Tho' all her fairest forms are types of thee. 
And thou of God in thy great charity) 40 

Of such a finish'd chasten'd purity. 



50 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

MARIANA 

' Mariana in the moated grange.' 

Measure for Measure. 

With blackest moss the flower-plots 

Were thickly crusted, one and all : 
The rusted nails fell from the knots 

That held the pear to the gable-wall. 
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange : 5 

Unlifted was the clinking latch ; 
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
Upon the lonely moated grange. 

She only said, 'My life is dreary, 

He cometh not,' she said; 10 

She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! ' 

Her tears fell with the dews at even ; 

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried ; 
She could not look on the sweet heaven, 15 

Either at morn or eventide. 
After the flitting of the bats. 

When thickest dark did trance the sky. 
She drew her casement-curtain by, 
And glanced athwart the glooming flats. 20 

She only said, ' The night is dreary. 

He cometh not,' she said ; 

She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 

I would that I were dead ! ' 

Upon the middle of the night, 25 

. Waking she heard the night-fowl crow : 



MARIANA 51 

The cock sung out an hour ere light : 

From the dark fen the oxen's low 
Came to her : without hope of change, 

In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, 30 

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn 
About the lonely moated grange. 

She only said, 'The day is dreary. 

He cometh not,' she said ; 
She said, ' 1 am aweary, aweary, 35 

I would that I were dead ! ' 



About a stone-cast from the wall 

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
And o'er it many, round and small. 

The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 40 

Hard by a poplar shook alway, 
AH -silver-green with gnarled bark: 
For leagues no other tree did mark 
The level waste, the rounding gray. 

She only said, ' My hfe is dreary, 45 

He cometh not,' she said ; 

She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 

I would that I were dead ! ' 



And ever when the moon was low, 

And the shrill winds were up and away, 50 

In the white curtain, to and fro. 

She saw the gusty shadow sway. 
But when the moon was very low, 

And wild winds bound within their cell. 

The shadow of the poplar fell 55 

Upon her bed, across her brow. 



52 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

She only said, ' The night is dreary, 
He cometh not,' she said ; 

She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! ' 



A.11 day within the dreamy house, 

The doors upon their hinges creak'd ; 
The blue fly sung in the pane ; the mouse 
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd. 
Or from the crevice peer'd about. 65 

Old faces ghmmer'd thro' the doors, 
Old footsteps trod the upper floors. 
Old voices called her from without. 
She only said, ^ My hfe is dreary, 

He cometh not,' she said ; 70 

She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! ' 

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof. 

The slow clock ticking, and the sound 
Which to the wooing wind aloof 75 

The poplar made, did all confound 
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour 
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay 
Athwart the chambers, and the day 
Was sloping toward his western bower. 80 

Then, said she, * I am very dreary. 

He will not come,' she said ; 

She wept, * I am aweary, aweary, 

Oh God, that I were dead ! ' 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 53 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 

I READ, before my eyelids dropt their shade, 

^The Legend of Good Women,' long ago 
Sung by the morning-star of song, who made 

His music heard below ; 

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath 5 

Preluded those melodious bursts that fill 
The spacious times of great Elizabeth 

With sounds that echo still. 

And, for a while, the knowledge of his art 

Held me above the subject, as strong gales 10 

Hold swollen clouds from raining, tho' my heart, 

Brimful of those wild tales, 

Charged both mine eyes with tears. In every land 

I saw, wherever light illumineth, 
Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand 15 

The downward slope to death. 

Those far-renowned brides of ancient song 
Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars, 

And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong, 

And trumpets blown for wars ; 20 

And clattering flints batter'd with clanging hoofs; 

And I saw crowds in column'd sanctuaries ; 
And forms that pass'd at windows and on roofs 

Of marble palaces ; 



54 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Corpses across the threshold ; heroes tall 

Dislodging pinnacle and parapet 
Upon the tortoise creeping to the wall ; 

Lances in ambush set ; 

And high shrine-doors burst thro' with heated blasts 
That run before the fluttering tongues of fire ; 

White surf wind-scatter'd over sails and masts, 
And ever climbing higher ; 

Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates, 
Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes. 

Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates. 
And hush'd seraglios. 

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land 
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way. 

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand. 
Torn from the fringe of spray. 

I started once, or seem'd to start in pain. 

Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak, 

As when a great thought strikes along the brain, 
And flushes all the cheek. 

And once my arm was lifted to hew down 

A cavalier from off his saddle-bow. 
That bore a lady from a leaguer'd town ; 

And then, I know not how. 

All those sharp fancies, by down-lapsing thought 
Stream'd onward, lost their edges, and did creep 

RoU'd on each other, rounded, smooth'd, and brought 
Into the gulfs of sleep. 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 55 

At last methought that 1 had wander'd far 
In an old wood : fresh-wash'd in coolest dew 

The maiden splendours of the morning star 55 

Shook in the stedfast blue. 

Enormous elm-tree-l^oles did stoop and lean 

Upon the dusky brushwood underneath 
Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green, 

New from its silken sheath. 60 

The dim red morn had died, her journey done, 
And with dead hps smiled at the twilight plain, 

Half-fall'n across the threshold of the sun, 
Never to rise again. 

There was no motion in the dumb dead air, 65 

Not any song of bird or sound of rill ; 
Gross darkness of the inner sepulchre 

Is not so deadly still 

As that wide forest. Growths of jasmine turn'd 

Their humid arms festooning tree to tree, 70 

And at the root thro' lush green grasses burn'd 
The red anemone. 

I knew the flowers, I knew the leaves, I knew 

The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn 
On those long, rank, dark wood-walks drench'd in dew, 75 

Leading from lawn to lawn. 

The smell of violets, hidden in the green, 
Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame 

The times when I remember to have been 

Joyful and free from blame. 80 



56 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

And from within me a clear imder-tone 

Thrill'd thro' mine ears in that unblissful clime, 

' Pass ^reely thro' : the wood is all thine own, 
Until the end of time.' 

At length I saw a lady within call, 85 

Stiller than chisell'd marble, standing there; 

A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, 
x\nd most divinely fair. 

Her loveliness with shame and with surprise 

Froze my swift speech : she turning on my face 90 

The star-like sorrows of immortal eyes. 
Spoke slowly in her place. 

' I had great beauty : ask thou not my name : 
No one can be more wise than destiny. 

Many drew swords and died. Where'er I came 95 

I brought calamity.' 

' No mar\'el, sovereign lady : in fair field 
Myself for such a face had boldly died,' 

I answer'd free ; and turning I appeal'd 

To one that stood beside. 100 

But she, with sick and scornful looks averse. 
To her full height her stately stature draws; 

' My youth,' she said, ' was blasted with a curse : 
This woman was the cause. 

* I was cut off from hope in that sad place, 105 

Which men call'd Aulis in those iron years : 

My father held his hand upon his face ; 
I, blinded with my tears. 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 57 

' Still strove to speak : my voice was thick with sighs 
As in a dream. Dimly I could descry no 

The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes, 
Waiting to see me die. 

* The high masts flicker'd as they lay afloat ; 

The crowds, the temples, waver'd, and the shore ; 
The bright death quiver'd at the victim's throat; 115 

Touch'd ; and I knew no more.' 



Whereto the other with a downward brow : 
' I would the white cold heavy-plunging foam, 

Whirl'd by the wind, had roll'd me deep below, 

Then when I left my home.' 120 

Her slow full words sank thro' the silence drear, 

As thunder-drops fall on a sleeping sea : 
Sudden I heard a voice that cried, * Come here. 

That I may look on thee.' 

I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise, 125 

One sitting on a crimson scarf unroll'd ; 
A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes. 

Brow-bound with burning gold. 

She, flashing forth a haughty smile, began : 

' I govern'd men by change, and so I sway'd 130 

All moods. 'T is long since I have seen a man. 

Once, like the moon, I made 

' The ever-shifting currents of the blood 

According to my humour ebb and flow. 
I have no men to govern in this wood : 135 

That makes my only woe. 



58 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

' Nay — yet it chafes me that I could not bend 
One will; nor tame and tutor with mine eye 

That dull cold-blooded Caesar. Prythee, friend, 

Where is Mark Antony? 140 

' The man, my lover, with whom I rode sublime 
On Fortune's neck : we sat as God by God : 

The Nilus would have risen before his time 
And flooded at our nod. 

'We drank the Libyan Sun to sleep, and lit 145 

Lamps which out-burn'd Canopus. O my life 

In Egypt ! O the dalliance and the wit, 
The flattery and the strife, 

'And the wild kiss, when fresh from war's alarms, 

My Hercules, my Roman Antony, * 150 

My mailed Bacchus leapt into my arms, 
Contented there to die ! 

' And there he died : and when I heard my name 
Sigh'd forth with life I would not brook my fear 

Of the other: with a worm I balk'd his fame. 155 

What else was left? look here!' 

(With that she tore her robe apart, and half 
The polish'd argent of her breast to sight 

Laid bare. Thereto she pointed with a laugh, 

Showing the aspick's bite.) 160 

' I died a Queen. The Roman soldier found 
Me lying dead, my crown about my brows, 

A name for ever ! — lying robed and crown'd, 
Worthy a Roman spouse.' 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 59 

Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range 165 

Struck by all passion, did fall down and glance 

From tone to tone, and glided thro' all change 
Of liveliest utterance. 

When she made pause 1 knew not for delight ; 

Because with sudden motion from the ground 170 

She raised her piercing orbs, and fill'd with light 

The interval of sound. 

Still with their fires Love tipt his keenest darts ; 

As once they drew into two burning rings 
All beams of Love, melting the mighty hearts 175 

Of captains and of kings. 

Slowly my sense undazzled. Then I heard 
A noise of some one coming thro' the lawn. 

And singing clearer than the crested bird 

That claps his wings at dawn. iSo 

' 'i'he torrent brooks of hallow'd Israel 

From craggy hollows pouring, late and soon, 

Sound all night long, in falling thro' the dell, 
Far-heard beneath the moon. 

'The balmy moon of blessed Israel 185 

Floods all the deep-blue gloom with beams divine : 

All night the splinter'd crags that wall the dell 
With spires of silver shine.' 

As one that museth where broad sunshine laves 

The lawn by some* cathedral, thro' the door 190 

Hearing the holy organ rolling waves 
Of sound on roof and floor 



6o MELODIES AND PICTURES 

Within, and anthem sung, is charm'd and tied 

To where he stands, — so stood I, when that flow 

Of music left the lips of her that died 195 

To save her father's vow ; 

The daughter of the warrior Gileadite, 

A maiden pure ; as when she went along 
From Mizpeh's tower'd gate with welcome light, 

With timbrel and with song. 200 

My words leapt forth : ' Heaven heads the count of crimes 
With that wild oath.' She render'd answer high : 

' Not so, nor once alone ; a thousand times 
I would be born and die. 

* Single I grew, like some green plant, whose root 205 

Creeps to the garden water-pipes beneath, 

Feeding the flower ; but ere my flower to fruit 
Changed, I was ripe for death. 

' My God, my land, my father — these did move 

Me from my bliss of Hfe, that Nature gave, 210 

Lower'd softly with a threefold cord of love 
Down to a silent grave. 

' And I went mourning, " No fair Hebrew boy 
Shall smile away my maiden blame among 

The Hebrew mothers" — emptied of all joy, 215 

Leaving the dance and song, 

' Leaving the olive-gardens far below. 

Leaving the promise of my bridal bower. 
The valleys of grape-loaded vines that glow 

Beneath the battled tower. 220 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 6l 

•^The light white cloud swam over us. Anon 
We heard the lion roaring from his den ; 

We saw the large white stars rise one by one, 
Or, from the darken'd glen, 

' Saw God divide the night with flying flame, 225 

And thunder on the everlasting hills. 
I heard Him, for He spake, and grief became 

A solemn scorn of ills. 

* When the next moon was roll'd into the sky, 

Strength came to me that equall'd my desire. 230 

How beautiful a thing it was to die 
For God and for my sire ! 

* It comforts me in this one thought to dwell. 

That I subdued me to my father's will ; 
Because the kiss he gave me, ere I fell, 235 

Sweetens the spirit still. 

' Moreover it is written that my race 

Hew'd Ammon, hip and thigh, from Aroer 

On Arnon unto Minneth.' Here her face 

Glow'd, as I look'd at her. 240 

She lock'd her lips : she left me where I stood : 

' Glory to God,' she sang, and past afar, 
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood. 

Toward the morning-star. 

Losing her carol I stood pensively, 245 

As one that from a casement leans his head. 

When midnight bells cease ringing suddenly, 
And the old year is dead. 



62 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

'Alas ! alas ! ' a low voice, full of care, 

Murmur'd beside me : * Turn and look on me : 250 

I am that Rosamond, whom men call fair. 

If what I was I be. 

' AVould I had been some maiden coarse and poor ! 

O me, that I should ever see the light ! 
Those dragon eyes of anger'd Eleanor 255 

Do hunt me, day and night.' 

She ceased in tears, fallen from hope and trust : 
To whom the Egyptian : ' Oh, you tamely died ! 

You should have clung to Fulvia's waist, and thrust 

The dagger thro' her side.' 260 

With that sharp sound the white dawn's creeping beams, 
Stol'n to my brain, dissolved the mystery 

Of folded sleep. The captain of my dreams 
Ruled in the eastern sky. 

Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark, 265 

Ere I saw her, who clasp'd in her last trance 

Her murder'd father's head, or Joan of Arc, 
A light of ancient France ; 

Or her who knew that Eove can vanquish Death, 

Who kneeling, with one arm about her king, 270 

Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath. 
Sweet as new buds in Spring. 

No memory labours longer from the deep 
Gold-mines of thought to lift the hidden ore 

That glimpses, moving up, than I from sleep 275 

To gather and tell o'er 



SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE 63 

Each little sound and sight, ^^■ith what dull pain 
Compass'd, how eagerly I sought to strike 

Into that wondrous track of dreams again ! 

But no two dreams are like. 280 

As when a soul laments, which hath been blest, 
Desiring what is mingled with past years, 

In yearnings that can never be exprest 
By sighs or groans or tears ; 

Because all words, tho' cull'd with choicest art, 285 

FaiHng to give the bitter of the sweet, 
Wither beneath the palate, and the heart 

Faints, faded bv its heat. 



SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE 

A FRAGMENT 

Like souls that balance joy and pain. 
With tears and smiles from heaven again 
The maiden Spring upon the plain 
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain. 

In crystal vapour everywhere 
Blue isles of heaven laugh'd between, 
And far, in forest-deeps unseen. 
The topmost elm-tree gather'd green 

From draughts of balmy air. 

Sometimes the linnet piped his song : 
Sometimes the throstle whistled strong : 
Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel'd along, 
Hush'd all the groves from fear of wrong : 
By grassy capes with fuller sound 



64 MELODIES AND PICTURES 

In curves the yello^ving river ran, 15 

And drooping chestnut-buds began 
To spread into the perfect fan, 
Above the teeming ground. 

Then, in the boyhood of the year, 

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere 20 

Rode thro' the coverts of the deer. 

With blissful treble ringing clear. 

She seem'd a part of joyous Spring : 
A gown of grass-green silk she wore, 
Buckled with golden clasps before ; .25 

A light-green tuft of plumes she bore 

Closed in a golden ring. 

Now on some twisted i\y-net. 

Now by some tinkhng rivulet. 

In mosses mixt with violet 30 

Her cream-white mule his pastern set : 

And fleeter now she skimm'd the plains 
Than she whose elfin prancer springs 
By night to eery warbHngs, 
When all the glimmering moorland rings 35 

With jingling bridle-reins. 

As fast she fled thro' sun and shade, 

The happy winds upon her play'd, 

Blowing the ringlet from the braid : 

She look'd so lovely, as she sway'd 40 

The rein with dainty finger-tips, 
A man had given all other bliss. 
And all his worldly worth for this. 
To waste his whole heart in one kiss 

Upon her perfect Hps. 45 



II 

BALLADS, IDYLS, 
AND CHARACTER-PIECES 

(1) BALLADS 
THE LADY OF SHALOTT 

PARI I 

On either Iside the | river He 
Long fields of barley and of rye, 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky ; 
And thro' the field the road runs by 

To many-tower'd Camelot ; 5 

^ And up and down the people go, 
Gazing where the lilies blow 
Round an island there below, 

The island of Shalott. 

Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 10 

Little breezes dusk and shiver 
Thro' the wave that runs for ever 
By the island in the river 

Flowing down to Camelot. 
Four gray walls, and four gray towers, 15 

Overlook a space of flowers, 
And the silent isle imbowers 

The Ladv of Shalott. - - 

65 



66 BALLADS 

By the margin, willow-veil'd, 

Slide the heavy barges trail'd 20 

By slow horses ; and unhail'd 

The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd 

Skimming down to Camelot : 
But who hath seen her wave her hand? 
Or at the casement seen her stand? 25 

Or is she known in all the land, 

The Lady of Shalott? 

Only reapers, reaping early 

In among the bearded barley. 

Hear a song that echoes cheerly 30 

From the river winding clearly, 

Down to.tower'd Camelot: 
And by the moon the reaper weary, 
Piling sheaves in uplands airy. 
Listening, whispers ' 'T is the fairy 35 

Lady of Shalott.' 

' PART II 

There she weaves by night and day 

A magic web with colours gay. 

She has heard a whisper say, 

A curse is on her if she stay 40 

To look down to Camelot. 
She knows not what the curse may be. 
And so she weaveth steadily. 
And Httle other care hath she. 

The Lady of Shalott. 45 

And moving thro' a mirror clear 
That hangs before her all the year, 



THE LADY OF SHALOTT 6/ 

Shadows of the world appear. 
There she sees the highway near 

Winding down to Camelot : 50 

There the river eddy whirls, 
And there the surly village-churls, 
And the red cloaks of market girls, 

Pass onward from Shalott. 

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, 55 

An abbot on an ambling pad. 

Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, 

Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad, 

(loes by to tower'd Camelot : 
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue 60 

The knights come riding two and two : 
She hath no loyal knight and true. 

The Lady of Shalott. 

But in her web she still delights 

To weave the mirror's magic sights, 65 

For often thro' the silent nights 

A funeral, with plumes and lights 

And music, went to Camelot : 
Or when the moon was overhead, 
Came two young lovers lately wed ; . 70 

' I am half sick of shadows/ said 

The Lady of Shalott. 

PART III 

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves. 
He rode between the barley-sheaves, 
I'he sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, 75 

And flamed upon the brazen greaves 
Of bold Sir Lancelot. 



68 BALLADS 

A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd 
To a lady in his shield, 

That sparkled on the yellow field, 80 

Beside remote Shalott. 

The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, 

Like to some branch of stars we see 

Hung in the golden Galaxy. 

The bridle bells rang merrily 85 

As he rode down to Camelot : 
And from his blazon'd baldric slung 
A mighty silver bugle hung, 
And as he rode his armour rung, 

Beside remote Shalott. 90 

All in the blue unclouded weather 
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather, 
The helmet and the helmet-feather 
Burn'd like one burning flame together, 

As he rode down to Camelot. 95 

As often thro' the purple night. 
Below the starry clusters bright. 
Some bearded meteor, trailing light, 

Moves over still Shalott. 

His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd ; 100 

On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode ; 
From underneath his helmet flow'd 
His coal-black curls as on he rode. 

As he rode down to Camelot. 
From the bank and from the river 105 

He flash'd into the crystal mirror, 
* Tirra lirra,' by the river 

Sang Sir Lancelot. 



THE LADY OF SHALOTT 69 

She left the web, she left the loom, 

She made three paces thro' the room, no 

She saw the water-lily bloom, 

She saw the helmet and the plume, 

She look'd down to Camelot. 
Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side; 115 

'The curse is come upon me,' cried 

The Lady of Shalott. 

PART IV 

In the stormy east-wind straining, 

The pale yellow woods were waning, 

The broad stream in his banks complaining, 120 

Heavily the low sky raining 

Over tower'd Camelot ; 
Down she came and found a boat 
Beneath a willow left afloat, 
And round about the prow she wrote 125 

The Lady of Shalott. 

And down the river's dim expanse 

Tike some bold seer in a trance, 

Seeing all his own mischance — 

With a glassy countenance 130 

Did she look to Camelot. 
And at the closing of the day 
She loosed the chain, and down she lay ; 
The broad stream bore her far away. 

The Lady of Shalott. 135 

Lying, robed in snowy white ^ 

That loosely flew to left and right"^ 



70 



BALLADS 

The leaves upon her falling light — 
Thro' the noises of the night 

She floated down to Camelot : Mo 

And as the boat-head wound along 
The willowy hills and fields among, 
They heard her singing her last song. 

The Lady of Shalott. 

Heard a carol, mournful, holy, i45 

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly. 
Till her blood was frozen slowly, 
And her eyes were darken'd wholly, 

Turn'd to tower'd Camelot. 
For ere she reach'd upon the tide 150 

The first house by the water-side. 
Singing in her song she died, 

The Lady of Shalott. 

Under tower and balcony, 

By garden- wall and gallery, ^55 

A gleaming shape she floated by, 

Dead-pale between the houses high. 

Silent into Camelot. 
Out upon the wharfs they came. 
Knight and burgher, lord and dame, 160 

And round the prow they read her name. 

The Lady of Shalott. 

Who is this? and what is here? 
And in the lighted palace near 
Died the sound of royal cheer; 165 

And they cross'd themselves for fear. 
All the knights at Camelot : 



THE MAY QUEEN 71 

But Lancelot mused a little space ; 
He said, ' She has a lovely face ; 
God in his mercy lend her grace, 170 

The Lady of Shalott.' 



THE MAY QUEEN 

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear ; 
To-morrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year ; 
Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day ; 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, 1 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. , 

There 's many a black black eye, they say, but none so bright 5 

as mine ; 
There 's Margaret and Mary, there 's Kate and Caroline : 
But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say. 
So I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen o' 

the May. 

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake. 

If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break : 10 

But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands 

gay, 

For 1 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

As I came up the valley whom think ye should I see. 
But Robin leaning on the bridge beneath the hazel-tree ? 
He thought of that sharp look, mother, I gave him yesterday, 15 
But I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 



72 BALLADS 

He thought I was a ghost, mother, for I was all in white, 
And I ran by him without speaking, like a flash of light. 
They call me cruel-hearted, but I care not what they say. 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 20 
o' the May. 

They say he 's dying all for love, but that can never be : 
They say his heart is breaking, mother— what is that to me? 
There 's many a bolder lad 'ill woo me any summer day, 
And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

Little Effie shall go with me to-morrow to the green, 25 

And you '11 be there, too, mother, to see me made the Queen ; 
For the shepherd lads on every side 'ill come from far away, 
And 1 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

The honeysuckle round the porch has wov'n its wavy bowers. 
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo- 3° 

flowers ; 
And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and 

hoflows gray. 
And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 

o' the May. 

The night-winds come and go, mother, upon the meadow- 
grass. 

And the happy stars above them seem to brighten as they 
pass ; 

There will not be a drop of rain the whole of the livelong day, 35 

And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 



THE MAY QUEEN 73 

All the valley, mother, 'ill be fresh and green and still, 
And the cowsHp and the crowfoot are over all the hill, 
And the rivulet in the flowery dale 'ill merrily glance and play, 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 40 
o' the May. 

So you must wake and call me early, call me early, mother 

dear, 
To-morrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad Xew-year : 
To-morrow 'ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day, 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 

o' the May. 



NEW-YEAR'S EVE 

If you 're waking call me early, call me early, mother dear, 45 
For I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year. 
It is the last New-year that I shall ever see. 
Then you may lay me low i' the mould and think no more 
of me. 

To-night I saw the sun set : he set and left behind 

The good old year, the dear old time, and all my peace of 50 

mind ; 
And the New-year 's coming up, mother, but I shall never see 
The blossom on the blackthorn, the leaf upon the tree. 

Last May we made a crown of flowers : we had a merry day ; 
Beneath the hawthorn on the green they made me Queen of 

May; 
And we danced about the may-pole and in the hazel copse, 55 
Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney-tops. 



74 BALLADS 

There 's not a flower on all the hills : the frost is on the pane : 

I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again : 

I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high : 

I long to see a flower so before the day I die. 60 

The building rook 'ill caw from the windy tall elm-tree, 

And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, 

And the swallow 'ill come back again with summer o'er the 

wave, 
But I shall lie alone, mother, within the mouldering grave. 

Upon the chancel-casement, and upon that grave of mine, 65 

In the early early morning the summer sun 'ill shine, 
Before the red cock crows from the farm upon the hill, 
When you are warm-asleep, mother, and all the world is still. 

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning 

light 
You '11 never see me more in the long gray fields at night ; 70 

When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool 
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the 

pool. 

You '11 bury me, my mother, just beneath the hawthorn shade, 
And you '11 come sometimes and see me where I am lowly 

laid. 
I shall not forget you, mother, I shall hear you when you pass, 75 
With your feet above my head in the long and pleasant grass. 

I have been wild and wayward, but you '11 forgive me now ; 
You '11 kiss me, my own mother, and forgive me ere I go ; 
Nay, nay, you must not weep, nor let your grief be wild. 
You should not fret for me, mother, you have another child. 80 



THE MAY QUEEN 75 

If I can I '11 come again, mother, from out my resting-place ; 
Tho' you '11 not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face ;* 
Tho' I cannot speak a word, I shall harken what you say, 
And be often, often with you when you think I 'm far away. 

Goodnight, goodnight, when 1 have said goodnight for ever- 85 

more. 
And you see me carried out from the threshold of the door ; 
Don't let Efifie come to see me till my grave be growing green : 
She '11 be a better child to you than ever I have been. 

She '11 find my garden-tools upon the granary floor : 
Let her take 'em : they are hers : I shall never garden more : 90 
But tell her, when I 'm gone, to train the rosebush that I set 
About the parlour-window and the box of mignonette. 

Goodnight, sweet mother : call me before the day is born. 
All night I lie awake, but I flill asleep at morn ; 
But I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year, 95 

So, if you 're waking, call me, call me early, mother dear. 



CONCLUSION 

I THOUGHT to pass away before, and yet alive I am ; 

And in the fields all round I hear the bleating of the lamb. 

How sadly, I remember, rose the morning of the year ! 

To die before the snowdrop came, and now the violet 's here. 100 

O sweet is the new violet, that comes beneath the skies. 
And sweeter is the young lamb's voice to me that cannot rise, 
And sweet is all the land about, and all the flowers that blow, 
And sweeter far is death than life to me that long to go. 



76 BALLADS 

It seem'd so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessed sun, 105 
And now it seems as hard to stay, and yet His will be done ! 
But still I think it can't be long before I find release ; 
And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace. 

O blessings on his kindly voice and on his silver hair ! 

And blessings on his whole life long, until he meet me there ! no 

blessings on his kindly heart and on his silver head ! 

A thousand times I blest him, as he knelt beside my bed. 

He taught me all the mercy, for he show'd me all the sin. 
Now, tho' my lamp was lighted late, there 's One will let me in : 
Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be, 115 

P^or my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me. 

1 did not hear the dog howl, mother, or the death-watch beat, 
There came a sweeter token when the night and morning meet : 
But sit beside my bed, mother, and put your hand in mine, 

And Effie on the other side, and I will tell the sign. 120 

All in the wild March-morning 1 heard the angels call ; 
It was when the moon was setting, and the dark was over all ; 
The trees began to whisper, and the wind began to roll, 
And in the wild March-morning I heard them call my soul. 

For lying broad awake I thought of you and Effie dear ; 125 

I saw you sitting in the house, and I no longer here ; 
With all my strength I pray'd for both, and so I felt resign'd, 
And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind. 

1 thought that it was fancy, and 1 listen'd in my bed. 
And then did something speak to me — I know not what was said ; 130 
For great delight and shuddering took hold of all my mind, 
And up the valley came again the music on the wind. 



THE MAY QUEEN 77 

But you were sleeping ; and I said, ' It's not for them : it's 

mine.' 
And if it come three times, I thought, 1 take it for a sign. 
And once again it came, and close beside the window-bars, 135 
Then seem'd to go right up to Heaven and die among the 

stars. 

So now I think my time is near. I trust it is. I know 

The blessed music went that way my soul will have to go. 

And for myself, indeed, I care not if I go to-day. 

But, Effie, you must comfort her when I am passed away. 140 

And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret ; 
There 's many a worthier than I, would make him happy yet. 
If I had lived — I cannot tell — I might have been his wife ; 
But all these things have ceased to be, with my desire of life. 

O look ! the sun begins to rise, the heavens are in a glow ; 145 
He shines upon a hundred fields, and all of them I know. 
And there I move no longer now, and there his light may 

shine — 
Wild flowers in the valley for other hands than mine. 

O sweet and strange it seems to me, that ere this day is done 
The voice, that now is speaking, may be beyond the sun — 1 50 
For ever and for ever with those just souls and true — 
And what is life, that w^e should moan? why make we such 
ado? 

For ever and for ever, all in a blessed home — 
And there to wait a little while till you and Effie come — 
To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast — 155 
And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at 
rest. 



78 BALLADS 

IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL 

EMMIE 

I 

Our doctor had call'd in another, I never had seen him before, 
But he sent a chill to my heart when I saw him come in at 

the door. 
Fresh from the surgery-schools of France and of other lands — 
Harsh red hair, big voice, big chest, big merciless hands ! 
Wonderful cures he had done, O yes, but they said too of him 5 
He was happier using the knife than in trying to save the 

limb, 
And that I can well believe, for he look'd so coarse and so red, 
I could think he was one of those who would break their jests 

on the dead, 
And mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd at 

his knee — 
Drench'd with the hellish oorali — that ever such things should 10 

be! 



Here was a boy — I am sure that some of our children would 

die 
But for the voice of Love, and the smile, and the comforting 

eye — 
Here was a boy in the ward, every bone seem'd out of its 

place — 
Caught in a mill and crush'd — it was all but a hopeless case : 
And he handled him gently enough; but his voice and his 15 

face were not kind, 
And it was ])ut a hopeless case, he had seen it and made up 

his mind, 



I 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL 79 

And he said to me roughly ' The lad will need little more of 

your care.' 
'All the more need,' I told him, ' to seek the Lord Jesus in 

prayer ; 
They are all his children here, and I pray for them all as my 

own : ' 
But he turn'd to me, ' Ay, good woman, can prayer set a 20 

broken bone ? ' 
Then he mutter'd half to himself, but I know that I heard him 

say 
* All very well — but the good Lord Jesus has had his day.' 

Ill 

Had? has it come? It has only dawn'd. It will come by 

and by. 
O how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world 

were a lie? 
How could I bear with the sights and the loathsome smells 25 

of disease 
But that He said 'Ye do it to me, when ye do it to these'? 

TV 

So he went. And we past to this ward where the younger 

children are laid : 
Here is the cot of our orphan, our darling, our meek Httle 

maid ; 
Empty you see just now ! We have lost her who loved her so 

much — 
Patient of pain tho' as quick as a sensitive plant to the touch ; 30 
Hers was the prettiest prattle, it often moved me to tears. 
Hers was the gratefullest heart I have found in a child of her 

years — 



8o BALLADS 

Nay, you remember our Emmie ; you used to send her the 

flowers ; 
How she would smile at 'em, play with 'em, talk to 'em hours 

after hours ! 
.They that can wander at will where the works of the Lord are 35 

reveal'd 
Little guess what joy can be got from a cowslip out of the field ; 
Flowers to these 'spirits in prison' are all they can know of 

the spring, 
They freshen and sweeten the wards like the waft of an Angel's 

wing ; 
And she lay with a flower in one hand and her thin hands 

crost on her breast — 
Wan, but as pretty as heart can desire, and we thought her at 40 

rest, 
Quietly sleeping — so quiet, our doctor said ' Poor Httle dear. 
Nurse, I must do it to-morrow ; she '11 never live thro' it, I fear.' 



I walk'd with our kindly old doctor as far as the head of the stair, 
Then I return'd to the ward ; the child did n't see I was there. 



VI 

Never since I was nurse, had I been so grieved and so vext ! 45 
Emmie had heard him. Softly she call'd from her cot to the 

next, 
* He says I shall never live thro' it, O Annie, what shall I do? ' 
Annie consider'd. * If I,' said the wise Httle Annie, 'was you, 
I should cry to the dear Lord Jesus to help me, for, Emmie, 

you see. 
It 's all in the picture there : " Little children should come to 50 

me." ' 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL 8l 

(Meaning the print that you gave us, 1 find that it ahvays can 

please 
Our children, the dear Lord Jesus with children about his 

knees.) 
'Yes, and I will,' said Emmie, 'but then if I call to the Lord, 
How should he know that it's me? such a lot of beds in the 

ward ! ' 
That was a puzzle for Annie. Again she consider'd and said : 55 
' Emmie, you put out your arms, and you leave 'em outside 

on the bed — 
The Lord has so viuch to see to ! but, Emmie, you tell it him 

plain, 
It 's the little girl with her arms lying out on the counterpane.' 



VII 

J had sat three nights by the child — I could not watch her 

for four — 
My brain had begun to reel — I felt I could do it no more. 60 
That was my sleeping-night, but I thought that it never would 

pass. 
There was a thunderclap once, and a clatter of hail on the 

glass, 
And there was a phantom cry that I heard as I tost about. 
The motherless bleat of a lamb in the storm and the darkness 

without ; 
My sleep was broken besides with dreams of the dreadful knife 65 
And fears for our delicate Emmie who scarce would escape 

with her hfe ; 
Then in the gray of the morning it seem'd she stood by me 

and smiled, 
And the doctor came at his hour, and we went to see to the 

child. 



82 BALLADS 



VIII 



He had brought his ghastly tools : we beheved her asleep 

again — 
Her dear, long, lean, little arms lying out on the counterpane ; 70 
Say that His day is done ! Ah why should we care what they 

say? 
The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had 

past away. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE 



Half a league, half a league. 
Half a league onward, 

All in the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 

' Forward, the Light Brigade ! 

Charge for the guns ! ' he said : 

Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 



* Forward, the Light Brigade ! 
Was there a man dismay'd? 
Not tho' the soldier knew 

Some one had blunder'd : 
Theirs not to make reply. 
Theirs not to reason why. 
Theirs but to do and die : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE 83 

III 

Cannon to right of them, 

Cannon to left of them, 

Cannon m front of them 20 

Voll^y'd and thunder'd ; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell ' 25 

Rode the six hundred. 



Flash'd all their sabres bare, 

Flash'd as they turned in air 

Sabring the gunners there, 

Charging an army, while 30 

All the world wonder'd : 
Plunged in the battery-smoke 
Right thro' the line they broke ; 
Cossack and Russian 
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke 35 

Shattered and sunder'd. 
Then they rode back, but not — 

Not the six hundred. 



Cannon to right of them. 

Cannon to left of them, 40 

Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thunder'd ; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell. 
While horse and hero fell. 



84 BALLADS 



They that had fought so well 45 

Came thro' the jaws of Death, 
Back from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them, 
Left of six hundred. 



When can their glory fade? 50 

O the wild charge they made ! 

All the world wonder'd. 
Honour the charge they made ! 
Honour the Light Brigade, 

Noble six hundred ! 55 



THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE 
AT BALACLAVA 

October 25, 1854 



The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade ! 
Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians, 
Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley — and stay'd ; 
For Scarlett and Scarlett's three hundred were riding by 
When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky ; 
And he call'd ' Left wheel into line ! ' and they wheel'd and 

obey'd. 
Then he look'd at the host that had halted he knew not 

why, 
And he turn'd half round, and he bade his trumpeter sound 



THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE 85 

To the charge, and he rode on ahead, as he waved his blade 
To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die — 
' Follow,' and up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, 
FoUow'd the Heavy Brigade. 



The trumpet, the gallop, the charge, and the might of the fight ! 

Thousands of horsemen had gather'd there on the height. 

With a wing push'd out to the left and a wing to the right, 15 

And who shall escape if they close? but he dash'd up alone 

Thra' the great gray slope of men, 

Sway'd his sabre, and held his own 

Like an Englishman there and then : 

All in a moment follow'd with force 20 

Three that were next in their fiery course, 

Wedged themselves in between horse and horse. 

Fought for their lives in the narrow gap they had made — 

Four amid thousands ! and up the hill, up the hill, 

Gallopt the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade. 25 

III 

Fell Hke a cannonshot. 

Burst like a thunderbolt, 

Crash'd like a hurricane, 

Broke thro' the mass from below. 

Drove thro' the midst of the foe, 30 

Plunged up and down, to and fro. 

Rode flashing blow upon blow, 

Brave Inniskillens and Greys 

Whirling their sabres in circles of light ! 

And some of us, all in amaze, 35 

Who were held for a while from the fight, 

And were only standing at gaze. 



86 BALLADS 

When the dark-muffled Russian crowd 

Folded its wings from the left and the right, 

And roll'd them around Uke a cloud, — 40 

O mad for the charge and the battle were we, 

When our own good redcoats sank from sight. 

Like drops of blood in a dark-gray sea, 

And we turn'd to each other, whispering, all dismay'd, 

' Lost are the gallant three hundred of Scarlett's Brigade ! ' 45 

IV 

* Lost one and all ' were the words 

Mutter'd in our dismay; 

But they rode like Victors and Lords 

Thro' the forest of lances and swords 

In the heart of the Russian hordes, 5° 

They rode, or they stood at bay — 

Struck with the sword-hand and slew, 

Down with the bridle-hand drew 

The foe from the saddle and threw 

Underfoot there in the fray — 55 

Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock 

In the wave of a stormy day ; 

Till suddenly shock upon shock 

Stagger'd the mass from without, 

Drove it in wild disarray, 60 

For our men gallopt up with a cheer and a shout, 

And the foeman surged, and waver'd, and reel'd 

Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, out of the field, 

And over the brow and away. 



Glory to each and to all, and the charge that they made ! 65 
Glory to all the three hundred, and .all the Brigade ! 



THE REVENGE 8/ 

THE REVENGE 

A BALLAD OF THE FLEET 
I 

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, 
And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away : 
' Spanish ships of war at sea ! we have sighted fifty-three ! ' 
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard : ' 'Fore God I am no 

coward ; 
But I cannot meet them here, for my shi])s are out of gear, 
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick. 
We are six ships of the line ; can we fight with fifty-three? ' 

II 

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville : ' I know you are no coward ; 
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. 
But I 've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. 
I should count myself the coward if 1 left them, my Lord 

Howard, 
To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.' 

Ill 

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that day. 

Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven ; 

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land 

Very carefully and slow. 

Men of Bideford in Devon, 

And we laid them on the ballast down below ; 

For we brought them all aboard, 

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to 

Spain, 
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord. 



10 



88 BALLADS 



IV 



He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight, 

And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight, 

With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow. 

* Shall we fight or shall we fly? ^5 

Good Sir Richard, tell us now, 

For to fight is but to die ! 

There '11 be Uttle of us left by the time this sun be set.' 

And Sir Richard said again : ' We be all good EngHsh men. 

Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil, 3° 

For I never turn'd my back upon Don or devil yet.' 



Sir Richard spoke and he laugh'd, and we roar'd a hurrah, 

and so 
The Httle Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe. 
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below ; 
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were 35 

seen, 
And the Uttle Revenge ran on thro' the long sea-lane between. 



VI 

Thousands of their soldiers look'd down from their decks and 

laugh'd, 
Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft 
Running on and on, till delay'd 
By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred 40 

tons. 
And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of 

guns, 
Took the breath from our sails, and we stay'd. 



THE REVENGE 89 

VII 

And while now the great San PhiHp hung above us Uke a cloud 

Whence the thunderbolt will fall 

Long and loud, 45 

Four galleons drew away 

From the Spanish fleet that day, 

And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay, 

And the battle-thunder broke from them all. 

VIII 

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went 50 
Having that within her womb that had left her ill content ; 
And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to 

hand, 
For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers, 
And a dozen times we shook 'em off as a dog that shakes his ears 
When he leaps from the water to the land. 55 

IX 

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the 
summer sea, 

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty- 
three. 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons 
came, 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder 
and flame ; 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead 60 
and her shame. 

For some were sunk and many were shatter 'd, and so could 
fight us no more — 

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before? 



90 BALLADS 



For he said ' Fight on ! fight on ! ' 

Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck ; 

And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was 65 

gone, 
With a grisly wound to be drest he had left the deck, 
But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead, 
And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head, 
And he said ' Fight on ! fight on ! ' 

XI 

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the 70 

summer sea. 
And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a 

ring; 
But they dared not touch us again, for they fear'd that we still 

could sting. 
So they watch'd what the end would be. 
And we had not fought them in vain. 

But in perilous plight were we, 75 

Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain. 
And half of the rest of us maim'd for Hfe 
In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife ; 
And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark 

and cold, 
And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was So 

all of it spent ; 
And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side ; 
But Sir Richard cried in his English pride, 
< We have fought such a fight for a day and a night 
As may never be fought again ! 
We have won great glory, my men ! 85 



THE REVENGE 91 

And a day less or more 

At sea or ashore, 

We die — does it matter when ? 

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner — sink her, spHt her in twain ! 

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain ! ' 90 

XII 

And the gunner said ' Ay, ay,' but the seamen made reply : 

' We have children, we have wives, 

And the Lord hath spared our lives. 

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go ; 

We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.' 95 

And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe. 

XIII 

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then. 
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at 

last. 
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign 

grace ; 
But he rose upon their decks, and he cried : 100 

' I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and 

true ; 
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do : 
With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die ! ' 
And he fell upon their decks, and he died. 



And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true, 105 
And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap 
That he dared her with one little ship and his English few ; 
Was he devil or man ? He was devil for aught they knew, 



92 



IDYLS 



But they sank his body with honour down into the deep, 

And they mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier ahen crew, no 

And away she sail'd with her loss and long'd for her own ; 

When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep, 

And the water began to heave and the weather to moan, 

And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew. 

And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew, 1 1 5 

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and 

their flags, 
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy 

of Spain, 
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags 
To be lost evermore in the main. 



(2) ENGLISH IDYLS 
THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 

OR, THE PICTURES 

This morning is the morning of the day, 
AVhen I and Eustace from the city went 
To see the gardener's daughter ; I and he, 
Brothers in Art ; a friendship so complete 
Portion'd in halves between us, that we grew 
The fable of the city where we dwelt. 

My Eustace might have sat for Hercules ; 
So muscular he spread, so broad of breast. 
He, by some law that holds in love, and draws 
The greater to the lesser, long desired 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 93 

A certain miracle of Symmetry, 

A miniature of loveliness, all grace 

Summ'd up and closed in little; — Juliet, she 

So light of foot, so light of spirit — oh, she 

To me myself, for some three careless moons, 15 

The summer pilot of an empty heart 

Unto the shores of nothing ! Know you not 

Such touches are but embassies of love. 

To tamper with the feelings, ere he found 

Empire for life? but Eustace painted her, 20 

And said to me, she sitting with us then, 

'When wiW you paint like this?' and I replied, 

(My words were half in earnest, half in jest,) 

'Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, 

A more ideal Artist he than all, 25 

Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes 

Darker than darkest pansies, and that hair 

More black than ashbuds in the front of March.' 

And Juliet answer'd laughing, ' Go and see 

The gardener's daughter : trust me, after that, 30 

You scarce can fail to match his masterpiece.' 

And up we rose, and on the spur we went. 

Not wholly in the busy world, nor cjuite 
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. 
News from the humming city comes to it 35 

In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
The windy clanging of the minster clock : 
Although between it and the garden lies 
A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream, 40 

That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar. 
Waves all its lazy liHes, and creeps on. 



94 IDYLS 

Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge 
Crovvn'd with the minster-towers. 

The fields between 
Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-udder'd kine. 
And all about the large lime feathers low. 
The Hme a summer home of murmurous wings. 

In that still place she, hoarded in herself, 
Grew, seldom seen ; not less among us lived 
Her fame from lip to lip. Who had not heard 
Of Rose, the gardener's daughter? Where was he, 
So blunt in memory, so old at heart. 
At such a distance from his youth in grief. 
That, having seen, forgot? The common mouth. 
So gross to express delight, in praise of her 
Grew oratory. wSuch a lord is Love, 
And Beauty such a mistress of the world. 

And if I said that Fancy, led by Love, 
^Vould play with flying forms and images. 
Yet this is also true, that, long before 
I look'd upon her, when I heard her name 
My heart was like a prophet to my heart. 
And told me I should love. A crowd of hopes. 
That sought to sow themselves like winged seeds. 
Born out of everything I heard and saw, 
Flutter'd about my senses and my soul ; 
And vague desires, like fitful blasts of balm 
To one that travels quickly, made the air 
Of Life delicious, and all kinds of thought. 
That verged upon them, sweeter than the dream 
Dream'd by a hapi)y man, when the dark East, 
Unseen, is brightening to his bridal morn. 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 95 

And sure this orbit of the memory folds 
For ever in itself the day we went 

To see her. All the land in flowery squares, 75 

Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, 
Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud 
Drew downward : but all else of heaven was pure 
Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge. 
And May with me from head to heel. And now, 80 

As tho' 'twere yesterday, as tho' it were 
The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound, 
(For those old Mays had thrice the life of these,) 
Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze, 
And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood, 85 

Leaning his horns into the neighl)our field. 
And lowing to his fellows. From the woods 
Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy. 
But shook his song together as he near'd 90 

His happy home, the ground. To left and right. 
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills ; 
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
The redcap whistled ; and the nightingale 
Sang loud, as tho' he were the bird of day. 95 

And Eustace turn'd, and smiling said to me, 
* Hear how the bushes echo ! by my life, 
• These birds have joyful thoughts. Think you they sing 
Tike poets, from the vanity of song? 

Or have they any sense of why they sing? 100 

And would they praise the heavens for what they have?' 
And I made answer, ' Were there nothing else 
For which to praise the heavens but only love. 
That only love were cause enough for praise,' 



96 IDYLS 

Lightly he laugh'd, as one that read my thought, 105 
And on we went ; but ere an hour had pass'd, 
We reach'd a meadow slanting to the North ; 
Down which a well-worn pathway courted us 
To one green wicket in a privet hedge ; 
This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk no 

Thro' crowded lilac-ambush trimly pruned ; 
And one warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew 
Beyond us, as we enter'd in the cool. 
The garden stretches southward. In the midst 
A cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade. 115 

The garden-glasses glanced, and momently 
The twinkling laurel scatter'd silver lights. 

' Eustace,' I said, ' this wonder keeps the house.' 
He nodded, but a moment afterwards 
He cried, 'Look! look!' Before he ceased 1 turn'd, 120 
And, ere a star can wink, beheld her there. 

For up the porch there grew an Eastern rose, 
That, flowering high, the last night's gale had caught, 
And blown across the walk. One arm aloft — 
(jown'd in pure white, that fitted to the shape — 125 

Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood, 
A single stream of all her soft brown hair 
Pour'd on one side : the shadow of the flowers 
Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering 
Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist — '130 

Ah, happy shade — and still went wavering down. 
But, ere it touch'd a foot, that might have danced 
The greensward into greener circles, dipt, 
And mix'd with shadows of the common ground ! 
But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn'd 135 

Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe bloom, 



ii 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 97 

And doubled his own warmth against her Ups, 

And on the bounteous wave of such a breast 

As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade, 

She stood, a sight to make an old man young. 140 

So rapt, we near'd the house ; but she, a Rose 
In roses, mingled with her fragrant toil, 
Nor heard us come, nor from her tendance turn'd 
Into the world without ; till close at hand. 
And almost ere I knew mine own intent, 145 

This murmur broke the stillness of that air 
Which brooded round about her : 

' Ah, one rose, 
One rose, but one, by those fair fingers cull'd, 
Were worth a hundred kisses press'd on lips 
I>ess exquisite than thine.' 

She look'd : but all 150 

Suffused with blushes — neither self-possess'd 
Nor startled, but betwixt this mood and that, 
Divided in a graceful quiet — paused. 
And dropt the branch she held, and turning, wound 
Her looser hair in braid, and stirr'd her lips 155 

For some sweet answer, tho' no answer came, 
Nor yet refused the rose, but granted it. 
And moved away, and left me, statue-like, 
In act to render thanks. 

I, that whole day, 
Saw her no more, altho' I hnger'd there 160 

Till every daisy slept, and Love's white star 
Beam'd thro' the thicken'd cedar in the dusk. 

So home we went, and all the Hvelong way 
With solemn gibe did Eustace banter me. 
'Now,' said he, 'will you climb the top of Art. 165 



98 IDYLS 

You cannot fail but work in hues to dim 
The Titianic Flora. Will you match 
My Juliet? you, not you, — the Master, Love, 
A more ideal Artist he than all.' 

So home I went, but could not sleep for joy, 170 

Reading her perfect features in the gloom, 
Kissing the rose she gave me o'er and o'er, 
And shaping faithful record of the glance 
That graced the giving — such a noise of life 
Swarm'd in the golden present, such a voice 175 

Call'd to me from the years to come, and such 
A length of bright horizon rimm'd the dark. 
And all that night I heard the watchman peal 
The sliding season : all that night I heard 
The heavy clocks knolling the drowsy hours. 180 

The drowsy hours, dispensers of all good, 
O'er the mute city stole with folded wings, 
Distilling odours on me as they went 
To greet their fairer sisters of the East. 

Love at first sight, first-born, and heir to all, 185 

Made this night thus. Henceforward squall nor storm 
Could keep me from that Eden where she dwelt. 
Light pretexts drew me ; sometimes a Dutch love 
For tulips : then for roses, moss or musk, 
To grace my city rooms; or fruits and cream 190 

Served in the weeping elm ; and more and more 
A word could bring the colour to my cheek ; 
A thought would fill my eyes with happy dew; 
Love trebled life within me, and with each 
The year increased. 

The daughters of the year, 195 

One after one, thro' that still garden pass'd ; 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 99 

Each garlanded with her pecuHar flower 

Danced into Hght, and died into the shade ; 

And each in passing touch'd with some new grace 

Or seem'd to touch her, so that day by day, 200 

Like one that never can be wholly known. 

Her beauty grew ; till Autumn brought an hour 

For Eustace, when I heard his deep ' I will,' 

Breathed, like the covenant of a God, to hold 

From thence thro' all the worlds : but I rose up 205 

Full of his bliss, and following her dark eyes 

Felt earth as air beneath me, till I reach'd 

The wicket-gate, and found her standing there. 

There sat we down upon a garden mound, 
Two mutually enfolded ; Love, the third, 210 

Between us, in the circle of his arms 
Enwound us both ; and over many a range 
Of waning lime the gray cathedral towers. 
Across a haiiy glimmer of the west, 

Reveal'd their shining windows: from them clash'd 215 
The bells ; we listen'd ; with the time we play'd. 
We spoke of other things ; we coursed about 
The subject most at heart, more near and near. 
Like doves about a dovecote, wheeling round 
The central wish, until we settled there. 220 

Then, in that time and place, I spoke to her. 
Requiring, tho' I knew it was mine own. 
Yet for the pleasure that I took to hear. 
Requiring at her hand the greatest gift, 
A woman's heart, the heart of her I loved ; 225 

And in that time and place she answer'd me, 
And in the compass of three little words. 
More musical than ever came in one, 

L ofC 



lOO IDYLS 

The silver fragments of a broken voice, 

Made me most happy, faltering, ' I am thine.' 230 

Shall I cease here? Is this enough to say 
That my desire, like all strongest hopes, 
By its own energy fulfill'd itself. 
Merged in completion? Would you learn at full 
How passion rose thro' circumstantial grades 235 

Beyond all grades develop'd? and indeed 
I had not staid so long to tell you all, 
But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes, 
Holding the folded annals of my youth ; 
And while I mused, Love with knit brows went by, 240 
And with a flying finger swept my hps, 
And spake, * Be wise : not easily forgiven 
Are those who, setting wide the doors that bar 
The secret bridal chambers of the heart, 
Let in the day.' Here, then, my words have end. 245 

Yet might I tell of meetings, of farewells — 
Of that which came between, more sweet than each, 
In whispers, like the whispers of the leaves 
That tremble round a nightingale — in sighs 
Which perfect Joy, perplex'd for utterance, 250 

Stole from her sister Sorrow. Might I not tell 
Of difference, reconcilement, pledges given. 
And vows, where there was never need of vows. 
And kisses, where the heart on one wild leap 
Hung tranced from all pulsation, as above 255 

The heavens between their fairy fleeces pale 
Sow'd all their mystic gulfs with fleeting stars ; 
Or while the balmy glooming, crescent-lit. 
Spread the light haze along the river-shores, 
And in the hollows ; or as once we met 260 



DORA lOI 

Unheedful, tho' beneath a whispering rain 

Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind, 

And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep. 

But this whole hour your eyes have been intent 
On that veil'd picture — veil'd, for what it holds 265 

May not be dwelt on by the common day. 
This prelude has prepared thee. Raise thy soul ; 
Make thine heart ready with thine eyes : the time 
Is come to raise the veil. 

Behold her there, 
As I beheld her ere she knew my heart, 270 

My first, last love ; the idol of my youth, 
The darhng of my manhood, and, alas ! 
Now the most blessed memory of mine age. 

DORA 

With farmer Allan at the farm abode 
William and Dora. \\'illiam was his son. 
And she his niece. He often look'd at them, 
And often thought, 'I'll make them man and wife.' 
Now Dora felt her uncle's will in all, 5 

And yearn'd toward William ; but the youth, because 
He had been always with her in the house, 
Thought not of Dora. 

Then there came a day 
W^hen Allan call'd his son, and said, ' My son : 
I married late, but I would wish to see 10 

My grandchild on my knees before I die : 
And I have set my heart upon a match. 
Now therefore look to Dora ; she is well 
To look to ; thrifty too beyond her age. 
She is my brother's daughter: he and I 15 



02 IDYLS 

Had once hard words, and parted, and he died 
In foreign lands ; but for his sake I bred 
His daughter Dora : take her for your wife ; 
For I have wish'd this marriage, night and day, 
For many years.' But WilHam answer'd short : 
* I cannot marry Dora ; by my Hfe, 
I will not marry Dora.' Then the old man 
Was wroth, and doubled up his hands, and said : 
' You will not, boy ! you dare to answer thus ! 
But in my time a father's word was law, 
And so it shall be now for me. Look to it ; 
Consider, William : take a month to think. 
And let me have an answer to my wish; 
Or, by the Lord that made me, you shall pack, 
And never more darken my doors again.' 
But WilHam answer'd madly ; bit his lips. 
And broke away. The more he look'd at her 
The less he liked her ; and his ways were harsh ; 
But Dora bore them meekly. Then before 
The month was out he left his father's house. 
And hired himself to work within the fields ; 
And half in love, half spite, he woo'd and wed 
A labourer's daughter, Mary Morrison. 

Then, when the bells were ringing, Allan call'd 
His niece and said : ' My girl, I love you well ; 
But if you speak with him that was my son, 
Or change a word with her he calls his wife. 
My home is none of yours. My will is law.' 
And Dora promised, being meek. She thought, 
' It cannot be : my uncle's mind will change ! ' ■ 

And days went on, and there was born a boy 
To William ; then distresses came on him ; 



DORA 103 

And day by day he pass'd his father's gate, 

Heart-broken, and his father help'd him not. 

But Dora stored what httle she could save, 50 

And sent it them by stealth, nor did they know 

Who sent it ; till at last a fever seized 

On William, and in harvest time he died. 

Then Dora went to Mary. Mary sat 
And look'd with tears upon her boy, and thought 55 

Hard things of Dora. Dora came and said : 

* I have obey'd my uncle until now. 
And I have sinn'd, for it was all thro' me 
This evil came on William at the first. 
But, Mary, for the sake of him that 's gone, 60 

And for your sake, the woman that he chose. 
And for this orphan, I am come to you : 
You know there has not been for these five years 
So full a harvest : let me take the boy, 
And I will set him in my uncle's eye 65 

Among the wheat ; that when his heart is glad 
Of the full harvest, he may see the boy, 
And bless him for the sake of him that 's gone.' 

And Dora took the child, and went her way 
Across the wheat, and sat upon a mound 70 

That was unsown, where many poppies grew. 
Far off the farmer came into the field 
And spied her not ; for none of all his men 
Dare tell him Dora waited with the child ; 
And Dora would have risen and gone to him, 75 

But her heart fail'd her ; and the reapers reap'd. 
And t)ie sun fell, and all the land was dark. 



104 IDYLS 

But when the morrow came, she rose and took 
The child once more, and sat upon the mound; 
And made a Uttle wreath of all the flowers 80 

That grew about, and tied it round his hat 
To make him pleasing in her uncle's eye. 
Then when the farmer pass'd into the field 
He spied her, and he left his men at work, 
And came and said: 'Where were you yesterday? 85 

Whose child is that ? What are you doing here ? ' 
So Dora cast her eyes upon the ground. 
And answer'd softly, ' This is William's child ! ' 
' And did I not,' said Allan, ' did I not 
Forbid you, Dora ? ' Dora said again : 90 

*Do with me as you will, but take the child, 
And bless him for the sake of him that 's gone ! ' 
And Allan said, ' I see it is a trick 
Got up betwixt you aixi the woman there. 
I must be taught my duty, and by you ! 95 

You knew my word was law, and yet you dared 
To slight it. Well — for I will take the boy; 
But go you hence, and never see me more.' 

So saying, he took the boy, that cried aloud 
And struggled hard. The wreath of flowers fell 100 

At Dora's feet. She bowed upon her hands. 
And the boy's cry came to her from the field. 
More and more distant. She bow'd down her head. 
Remembering the day when first she came. 
And all the things that had been. She bow'd down. 105 
And wept in secret ; and the reapers reap'd. 
And the sun fell, and all the land was dark. 

Then Dora went to Mary's house, and stood 
Upon the threshold. Mary saw the boy 



DORA 105 

Was not with Dora. She broke out in praise no 

To God, that help'd her in her widowhood. 

And Dora said, * My uncle took the boy ; 

But, Mary, let me live and work with you : 

He says that he will never see me more.' 

Then answer'd Mary, ' This shall never be, 1 1 5 

That thou shouldst take my trouble on thyself: 

And, now I think, he shall not have the boy. 

For he will teach him hardness, and to slight 

His mother; therefore thou and I will go. 

And I will have my boy, and bring him home ; 1 20 

And I will beg of him to take thee back : 

But if he will not take thee back again, 

Then thou and I will live within one house. 

And work for William's child, until he grows 

Qf age to help us.' 

So the women kiss'd 125 

Each other, and set out, and reach'd the farm. 
The door was off the latch : they peep'd, and saw 
The boy set up betwixt his grandsire's knees, 
Who thrust him in the hollows of his arm, 
And clapt him on the hands and on the cheeks, 130 

Like one that loved him: and the lad stretch'd out 
And babbled for the golden seal, that hung 
From Allan's watch, and sparkled by the fire. 
Then they came in : but when the boy beheld 
His mother, he cried out to come to her : 135 

And Allan set him down, and Mary said : 

' O Father ! — if you let me call you so — 
I never came a-begging for myself. 
Or William, or this child ; but now I come 
For Dora : take her back ; she loves you well. 140 



I06 IDYLS 

Sir, when William died, he died at peace 
With all men; for I ask'd him, and he said. 
He could not ever rue his marrying me — 

1 had been a patient wife: but, Sir, he said 

That he was wrong to cross his father thus : i45 

"God bless him ! " he said, '^and may he never know 
The troubles 1 have gone thro' ! " Then he turn'd 
His face and pass'd — unhappy that 1 am ! 
But now, Sir, let me have my boy, for you 
Will make him hard, and he will learn to slight 150 

His father's memory ; and take Dora back, 
And let all this be as it was before.' 

So Mary said, and Dora hid her face 
By Mary. There was silence in the room ; 
And all at once the old man burst in sobs: — ' i55 

'I have been to blame — to blame. I have kill'd 
my son. 
I have kill'd him — but I loved him— my dear son. 
May God forgive me ! — I have been to blame. 
Kiss me, my children.' 

Then they clung about 
The old man's neck, and kiss'd him many times. 160 

And all the man was broken with remorse ; 
And all his love came back a hundred-fold ; 
And for three hours he sobb'd o'er William's child 
Thinking of William. 

So those four abode 
Within one house together; and as years 165 

Went forward, Mary took another mate ; 
But Dora lived unmarried till her death. 



CENONE 107 



(3) CHARACTER-PIECES 

(ENONE 

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier 

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. 

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, 

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, 

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand 5 

'I'he lawns and meadow-ledges midway down 

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars 

The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine 

In cataract after cataract to the sea. 

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus 10 

Stands up and takes the morning : but in front 

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal 

Troas and I lion's column'd citadel. 

The crown of Troas. 

Hither came at noon 
Mournful (Ejione, wandering forlorn 15 

Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills. 
Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck 
Floated her hair or seem'd to float in rest. 
She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine. 
Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade 20 

Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff. 

' O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, 
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
For now the noonday quiet holds the hill : 
The grasshopper is silent in the grass : 25 

The lizard, with his shadow on the stone. 



I08 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. 

The purple flower droops : the golden bee 

Is Hly-cradled : I alone awake. 

My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, 30 

My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim. 

And I am all aweary of my Hfe. 

'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, 
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 

Hear me, O Earth, hear me, O Hills, O Caves 35 

That house the cold crown'd snake ! O mountain brooks, 
I am the daughter of a River-God, 
Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all 
My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls 
Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed, 40 

A cloud that gather'd shape : for it may be 
That, while I speak of it, a httle while 
My heart may wander from its deeper woe. 

*0 mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, 
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 45 

I waited underneath the dawning hills, 
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, 
And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine : 
Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, 

Leading a jet-black goat white-horn'd, white-hooved, 50 
Came up from reedy Simois all alone. 

'O mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
Far-off the torrent call'd me from the cleft : 
Far up the soUtary morning smote 

The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes 55 

I sat alone : white-breasted like a star 



CENONE 109 

Fronting the dawn he moved ; a leopard skin 
Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair 
Cluster'd about his temples like a God's : 
And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens 60 
When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart 
Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came. 

' Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm 
Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold, 65 

That smelt ambrosially, and while I look'd 
And listen'd, the full-flowing river of speech 
Came down upon my heart. 

' " My own CEnone, 
Beautiful-brow'd OEnone, my own soul, 
Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav'n 70 

' For the most fair,' would seem to award it thine, 
As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt 
The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace 
Of movement, and the charm of married brows." 

' Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 75 

He prest the blossom of his lips to mine, 
And added "This was cast upon the board. 
When all the full-faced presence of the Gods 
Ranged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon 
Rose feud, with question unto whom 't were due : 80 

But light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve, 
Delivering, that to me, by common voice 
Elected umpire. Here comes to-day, 
Pallas and Aphrodite, claiming each 

This meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave 85 

Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine. 



no CHARACTER-PIECES 

Mayst well behold them imbeheld, unheard 
Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods." 

* Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
It was the deep midnoon : one silvery cloud 90 

Had lost his way between the piney sides 
Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, 
Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower. 
And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, 
Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, 95 

Lotos and lilies : and a wind arose. 
And overhead the wandering ivy and vine. 
This way and that, in many a wild festoon 
Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs 
With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. 100 

' O mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
On the tree-tops a crested peacock lit, 
And o'er him flow'd a golden cloud, and lean'd 
Upon him, slowly dropping fragrant dew. 
Then first I heard the voice of her, to whom 105 

Coming thro' Heaven, Hke a light that grows 
Larger and clearer, with one mind the Gods 
Rise up for reverence. She to Paris made 
Proffer of royal power, ample rule 

Unquestion'd, overflowing revenue no 

Whe-rewith to embellish state, " from many a vale 
And river-sunder'd champaign clothed with corn. 
Or labour'd mine undrainable of ore. 
Honour," she said, "and homage, tax and toll, 
From many an inland town and haven large, 115 

Mast-throng'd beneath her shadowing citadel 
In glassy bays among her tallest towers." 



CENONE III 

*0 mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
Still she spake on and still she spake of power, 
"Which in all action is the end of all; 120 

Power fitted to the season ; wisdom-bred 
And throned of wisdom — from all neighbour crowns 
Alliance and allegiance, till thy hand 
Fail from the sceptre-staff. Such boon from me. 
From me, Heaven's Queen, Paris, to thee king-born, 125 
A shepherd all thy life but yet king-born, 
Should come most welcome, seeing men, in power 
Only, are likest gods, who have attain'd 
Rest in a hai)py place and quiet seats 
Above the thunder, with undying bliss 130 

In knowledge of their own supremacy." 

* Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
She ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit 

Out at arm's-length, so much the thought of power 
Flatter'd his spirit; but Pallas where she stood 135 

Somewhat apart, her clear and bared limbs 
O'erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear 
Upon her pearly shoulder leaning cold. 
The while, above, her full and earnest eye 
Over her snow-cold breast and angry cheek 140 

Kept watch, waiting decision, made reply. 

* " Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control^ 
These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
Yet not for power (power of herself 

Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, 145 

Acting the law we live by without fear ; 
And, because right is right, to Jollow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." 



112 CHARACTER-PIECES 

*Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
Again she said: "I woo thee not with gifts. 150 

Sequel of guerdon could not alter me 
To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am, 
So shalt thou find me fairest. 

Yet, indeed, 
If gazing on divinity disrobed 

Thy mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair, 155 

Unbias'd by self-profit, oh ! rest thee sure, 
That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee, 
So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood, 
Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God's, 
To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks, 160 

Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow 
Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will. 
Circled thro' all experiences, pure law, 
Commeasure perfect freedom." 

* Here she ceas'd, 
And Paris ponder'd, and I cried, "O Paris, 165 

Give it to Pallas ! " but he heard me not, 
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me ! 

'O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, 
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 

Idalian Aphrodite beautiful, 170 

Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells, 
With rosy slender fingers backward drew 
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair 
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat 
And shoulder: from the violets her light foot 175 

Shone rosy-white, and o'er her rounded form 
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches 
Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved. 



CENONE 113 

* Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. 
She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes, 180 

The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh 
Half-whisper'd in his ear, " I promise thee 
The fairest and most loving wife in Greece." 
She spoke and laugh'd : I shut my sight for fear : 
But when I look'd, Paris had raised his arm, 185 

And I beheld great Here's angry eyes, 
As she withdrew into the golden cloud, 
And I was left alone within the bower ; 
And from that time to this I am alone, 
And I shall be alone until I die. 190 

'Yet, mother Ida, harken ere I die. • 

Fairest — why fairest wife? am I not fair? 
My love hath told me so a thousand times. 
Methinks 1 must be fair, for yesterday, 
When I past by, a wild and wanton pard, 195 

Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail 
Crouch'd fawning in the weed.. Most loving is she? 
Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms 
Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest 
Close, close to thine in that quick-falling dew 200 

Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains 
Flash in the pools of whirUng Simois. 

' O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
They came, they cut away my tallest pines, 
My tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge 205 
High over the blue gorge, and all between 
The snowy peak and snow-white cataract 
Foster'd the callow eaglet — from beneath 
Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn 



1 14 CHARACTER-PIECES 

The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat 210 

Low in the valley. Never, never more 

Shall lone tEnone see the morning mist 

Sweep thro' them ; never see them overlaid 

With narrow moon-lit sHps of silver cloud, 

Between the loud stream and the trembhng stars. 215 

' O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds. 
Among the fragments tumbled from the glens, 
Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her 
The Abominable, that uninvited came 220 

Into the fair Peleian banquet-hall, 
• And cast the golden fruit upon the board, 
And bred this change ; that I might speak my mind. 
And tell her to her face how much I hate 
Her presence, hated both of Gods and men. 225 

* O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times, 
In this green valley, under this green hill, 
Ev'n on this hand, and sitting on this stone? 
Seal'd it with kisses? water'd it with tears? 230 

O happy tears, and how unlike to these ! 
O happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face? 
O happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight? 

death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud, 

There are enough unhappy on this earth ; 235 

Pass by the happy souls, that love to live : 

1 pray thee, pass before my light of life. 
And shadow all my soul, that I may die. 
Thou weighest heavy on the heart within, 

Weigh heavy on my eyelids : let me die. 240 



CENONE 115 

* O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
I will not die alone, for fiery thoughts 

Do shape themselves within me, more and more, 

Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear 

Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills, 245 

Like footsteps upon wool. I dimly see 

My far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother 

Conjectures of the features of her child 

Ere it is born : her child ! — a shudder comes 

Across me : never child be born of me, 250 

Unblest, to vex me with his father's eyes ! 

* O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone. 
Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me 

Walking the cold and starless road of Death 255 

Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love 

With the Greek woman. I will rise and go 

Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth 

Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says 

A fire dances before her, and a sound 260 

Rings ever in her ears of armed men. 

What this may be I know not, but I know 

That, wheresoe'er I am by night and day, 

All earth and air seem only burning fire.' 



1 16 CHARACTER-PIECES 



ULYSSES 



It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 5 

I cannot rest from travel : I will drink 

Life to the lees : all times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone ; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 10 

Vext the dim sea : I am become a name ; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known : cities of men, 

And manners, chmates, councils, governments. 

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; 15 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

I am a part of all that I have met ; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 20 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end. 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use ! 

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on Hfe 

Were all too Httle, and of one to me 25 

Little remains : but every hour is saved 

From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things ; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself. 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 30 



ULYSSES 117 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle — 
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil 35 

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild 
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 
Subdue them to the useful and the good. 
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere 
Of common duties, decent not to fail 40 

In offices of tenderness, and pay 
Meet adoration to my household gods, 
When I am gone. He works his vyork, I mine. 

There lies the port ; the vessel puffs her sail : 
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, ' 45 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me — 
That ever with a frolic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old ; 
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil ; 50 

Death closes all : but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks : 
The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs : the deep 55 
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 60 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be the gulfs will wash us down : 



I i8 CHARACTER-PIECES 



1 



It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho' 65 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are ; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts. 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 70 



TITHONUS 

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, 

Man comes and tills the field and Hes beneath. 

And after many a summer dies the swan. 

Me only cruel immortaHty 

Consumes : I wither slowly in thine arms, 

Here at the quiet limit of the world, 

A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream 

The ever-silent spaces of the East, 

Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. 

Alas ! for this gray shadow, once a man — 
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice. 
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd 
To his great heart none other than a God ! 
I ask'd thee, ' Give me immortality.' 
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile. 
Like wealthy men who care not how they give. 
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, 
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, 
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd 



TITHONUS 119 

To dwell in presence of immortal youth, 

Immortal age beside immortal youth, 

And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love. 

Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now. 

Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, 25 

Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears 

To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: 

Why should a man desire in any way 

'1 o vary from the kindly race of men, 

Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance 30 

Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? 

A soft air fims the cloud ajjart ; there comes 
A glimpse of that dark world where 1 was born. 
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals 
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, 35 
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd. 
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom. 
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, 
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team 
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, 40 

And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, 
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. 

Lo ! ever thus thou growest beautiful 
In silence, then before thine answer given 
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. 45 

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, 
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt. 
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true? 
'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.' 



120 CHARACTER-PIECES 



T 



Ay me ! ay me ! with what another heart 50 

In days far-off, and with what other eyes 
I used to watch — if I be he that watch'd — 
The lucid outUne forming round thee; saw 
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; 
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood 55 
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all 
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, 
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm 
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds 
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd 60 

Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, 
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, 
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. 

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East : 
How can my nature longer mix with thine? 65 

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold 
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet 
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam 
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes 
Of happy men that have the power to die, 70 

And grassy barrows of the happier dead. 
Release me, and restore me to the ground ; 
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave : 
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn ; 
I earth in earth forget these empty courts, 75 

And thee returning on thy silver wheels. 



LUCRETIUS 121 



LUCRETIUS 



LuciLiA, wedded to Lucretius, found 
Her master cold ; for when the morning flush 
Of passion and the first embrace had died 
Between them, tho' he lov'd her none the less, 
Yet often when the woman heard his foot 5 

Return from pacings in the field, and ran 
To greet him with a kiss, the master took 
Small notice, or austerely, for — his mind 
Half buried in some weightier argument, 
Or fancy-borne perhaps upon the rise 10 

And long roll of the Hexameter — he past 
To turn and ponder those three hundred scrolls 
Left by the Teacher, whom he held divine. 
She brook'd it not ; but wrathful, petulant. 
Dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch 15 

Who brew'd the philtre which had power, they said, 
To lead an errant passion home again. 
And this, at times, she mingled with his drink, 
And this destroy'd him ; for the wicked broth 
Confused the chemic labour of the blood, 20 

And tickling the brute brain within the man's 
Made havock among those tender cells, and check'd 
His power to shape : he loathed himself ; and once 
After a tempest woke upon a morn 
That mock'd him with returning calm, and cried : 25 

' Storm in the night ! for thrice I heard the rain 
Rushing; and once the flash of a thunderbolt — 
Methought I never saw so fierce a fork — 
Struck out the streaming mountain-side, and show'd 
A riotous confluence of watercourses 30 



22 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Blanching and billowing in a hollow of it, 
Where all but yester-eve was dusty-dry. 

' Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams ! 
For thrice I waken'd after dreams. Perchance 
We do but recollect the dreams that come 35 

Just ere the waking : terrible ! for it seem'd 
A void was made in Nature ; all her bonds 
Crack'd ; and I saw the flaring atom-streams 
And torrents of her myriad universe, 

Ruining along the illimitable inane, 40 

Fly on to clash together again, and make 
Another and another frame of things 
For ever : that was mine, my dream, I knew it — 
Of and belonging to me, as the dog 

With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies 45 

His function of the woodland : but the next ! 
I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed 
Came driving rainlike down again on earth, 
And where it dash'd the reddening meadow, sprang 
No dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth, 50 

For these I thought my dream would show to me. 
But girls, Hetairai, curious in their art. 
Hired animalisms, vile as those that made 
The mulberry-faced Dictator's orgies worse 
Than aught they fable of the quiet Gods. 55 

And hands they mixt, and yell'd and round me drove 
In narrowing circles till 1 yell'd again 
Half- suffocated, and sprang up, and saw — 
Was it the first beam of my latest day? 

*Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the breasts, 60 
The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword 



LUCRETIUS 



23 



Now over and now under, now direct, 

Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed 

At all that beauty ; and as I stared, a fire, 

The fire that left a roofless Ilion, 65 

Shot out of them, and scorch'd me that I woke. 

' Is this thy vengeance, holy Venus, thine, 
Because I would not one of thine own doves, 
Not ev'n a rose, were offer'd to thee? thine, 
Forgetful how my rich prooemion , makes 70 

Thy glory fly along the Italian field. 
In lays that will outlast thy Deity? 

'Deity? nay, thy worshippers. My tongue 
Trips, or I speak profanely. Which of these 
Angers thee most, or angers thee at all? 75 

Not if thou be'st of those who, far aloof 
From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn. 
Live the great Hfe which all our greatest fain 
Would follow, centr'd in eternal calm. 

* Nay, if thou canst, O Goddess, like ourselves 80 

Touch, and be touch'd, then would I cry to thee 
To kiss thy Mavors, roll thy tender arms 
Round him, and keep him from the lust of blood 
That makes a steaming slaughter-house of Rome. 

' Ay, but I meant not thee ; I meant not her, 85 

Whom all the pines of Ida shook to see 
Slide from that quiet heaven of hers, and tempt 
The Trojan, while his neat-herds were abroad ; 
Nor her that o'er her wounded hunter wept 
Her Deity false in human-amorous tears ; 90 

Nor whom her beardless apple-arbiter 



124 



CHARACTER-PIECES 

Decided fairest. Rather, O ye Gods, 

Poet-like, as the great SiciUan called 

CaUiope to grace his golden verse — 

Ay, and this Kypris also — did I take 

That popular name of thine to shadow forth 

The all-generating powers and genial heat 

Of Nature, when she strikes thro' the thick blood 

Of cattle, and light is large, and lambs are glad 

Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird 

Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers : 

Which things appear the work of mighty Gods. 

' The Gods ! and if I go my work is left 
Unfinish'd — // I go. The Gods, who haunt 
The lucid interspace of world and world, 
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind. 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow. 
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans. 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
Their sacred everlasting calm ! and such, 
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm, 
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain 
Letting his own life go. The Gods, the Gods ! 
If all be atoms, how then should the Gods 
Being atomic not be dissoluble. 
Not follow the great law? My master held 
That Gods there are, for all men so believe. 
I prest my footsteps into his, and meant 
Surely to lead my Memmius in a train 
Of flowery clauses onward to the proof 
That Gods there are, and deathless. Meant? I meant? 
I have forgotten what I meant : my mind 
Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed. 



LUCRETIUS 125 

' Look where another of our Gods, the Sun, 
Apollo, Delius, or of older use 125 

All-seeing Hyperion — what you will — 
Has mounted yonder; since he never sware, 
Except his wrath were wreak'd on wretched man, 
That he would only shine among the dead 
Hereafter; tales! for never yet on earth 130 

Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox 
Moan round the spit — nor knows he what he sees ; 
King of the East altho' he seem, and girt 
With song and flame and fragrance, slowly lifts 
His golden feet on those empurpled stairs 135 

That climb into the windy halls of heaven : 
And here he glances on an eye new-born, 
And gets for greeting but a wail of pain ; 
And here he stays upon a freezing orb 
That fain would gaze upon him to the last ; 140 

And here upon a yellow eyelid fall'n 
And closed by those who mourn a friend in vain, 
Not thankful that his troubles are no more. 
And me, altho' his fire is on my face 
Blinding, he sees not, nor at all can tell 145 

Whether I mean this day to end myself. 
Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, 
That men like soldiers may not quit the post 
Allotted by the Gods : but he that holds 
The Gods are careless, wherefore need he care 150 

Greatly for them, nor rather plunge at once, 
Being troubled, wholly out of sight, and sink 
Past earthquake — ay, and gout and stone, that break 
Body toward death, and palsy, death-in-Hfe, 
And wretched age — and worst disease of all, 155 

These prodigies of myriad nakednesses, 



126 CHARACTER-PIECES 

And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable, 

Abominable, strangers at my hearth 

Not welcome, harpies miring every dish, 

The phantom husks of something foully done, i6o 

And fleeting thro' the boundless universe, 

And blasting the long quiet of my breast 

With animal heat and dire insanity? • 

' How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp 
These idols to herself? or do they fly 165 

Now thinner, and now thicker, like the flakes 
In a fall of snow, and so press in, perforce 
Of multitude, as crowds that in an hour 
Of civic tumult jam the doors, and bear 
The keepers' down, and throng, their rags and they 1 70 
The basest, far into that council-hall 
Where sit the best and stateKest of the land? 

* Can I not fling this horror oif me again, 
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile. 
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm, 175 

At random ravage? and how easily 
The mountain there has cast his cloudy slough, 
Now towering o'er him in serenest air, 
A mountain o'er a mountain, — ay, and within 
All hollow as the hopes and fears of men? 180 

' But who was he, that in the garden snared 
Picus and P'aunus, rustic Gods? a tale 
To laugh at — more to laugh at in myself — 
For look! what is it? there? yon arbutus 
Totters; a noiseless riot underneath 1S5 

Strikes through the wood, sets all the tops quivering — 



LUCRETIUS 127 

The mountain cjuickens into Nymph and Faun ; 

And here an Oread — how the sun deUghts 

To glance and shift about her sHppery sides, 

And rosy knees and supple roundedness, 190 

And budded bosom-peaks — who this way runs 

Before the rest — A satyr, a satyr, see. 

Follows ; but him I proved impossible ; 

Twy-natured is no nature : yet he draws 

Nearer and nearer, and I scan him now 195 

Beastlier than any phantom of his kind 

That ever butted his rough brother-brute 

For lust or lusty blood or provender : 

I hate, abhor, spit, sicken at him ; and she 

Loathes him as well ; such a ])recipitate heel, 200 

Fledged as it were with Mercury's ankle-wing. 

Whirls her to me : but will she fling herself. 

Shameless upon me ? Catch her, goat-foot : nay. 

Hide, hide them, million-myrtled wilderness. 

And cavern-shadowing laurels, hide ! do I wish — 205 

What ? — that the bush were leafless ? or to whelm 

All of them in one massacre? O ye Gods, 

I know you careless, yet, behold, to you 

From childly wont and ancient use I call — 

I thought I lived securely as yourselves — 210 

No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite. 

No madness of ambition, avarice, none : 

No larger feast than under plane or pine 

With neighbours laid along the grass, to take 

Only such cups as left us friendly- warm, 215 

Affirming each his own philosophy — 

Nothing to mar the sober majesties 

Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life. 

But now it seems some unseen monster lays 



1 28 CHARACTER-PIECES 

His vast and filthy hands upon my will, 220 

Wrenching it backward into his ; and spoils 

My bliss in being ; and it was not great ; 

For save when shutting reasons up in rhythm, 

Or Heliconian honey in hving words, 

To make a truth less harsh, I often grew 225 

Tired of so much within our little Hfe, 

Or of so little in our little hfe — 

Poor httle hfe that toddles half an hour 

Crown'd with a flower or two, and there an end — 

And since the nobler pleasure seems to fade, 230 

Why should I, beastlike as I find myself. 

Not manlike end myself? — our privilege — 

What beast has heart to do it? And what man, 

What Roman would be dragg'd in triumph thus? 

Not I ; not he, who bears one name with her 235 

Whose death-blow struck the dateless doom of kings, 

When, brooking not the Tarquin in her veins, 

She made her blood in sight of Collatine 

And all his peers, flushing the guiltless air. 

Spout from the maiden fountain in her heart. 240 

And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks 

As I am breaking now ! 

'And therefore now 
Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all, 
Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart 
Those bhnd beginnings that have made me man, 245 

Dash them anew together at her will 
Thro' all her cycles — into man once more, 
Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower : 
But till this cosmic order everywhere 
Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day 250 



LUCRETIUS 129 

Cracks all to pieces, — and that hour perhaps 

Is not so far when momentary man 

Shall seem no more a something to himself, 

But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes. 

And even his bones long laid within the grave, 255 

The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, 

Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void. 

Into the unseen for ever, — till that hour, 

My golden work in which I told a truth 

That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel, 260 

And numbs the Fury's ringlet-snake, and plucks 

The mortal soul from out immortal hell. 

Shall stand : ay, surely : then it falls at last 

And perishes as I must ; for O Thou, 

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity, 265 

Yearn'd after by the wisest of the wise. 

Who fail to find thee, being as thou art 

Without one pleasure and without one pain, 

Howbeit I know thou surely must be mine 

Or* soon or late, yet out of season, thus 270 

I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not 

How roughly men may woo thee so they win — 

Thus — thus: the soul flies out and dies in the air.' 

With that he drove the knife into his side : 
She heard him raging, heard him fall ; ran in, 275 

Beat breast, tore hair, cried out upon herself 
As having fail'd in duty to him, shriek'd 
That she but meant to win him back, fell on him, 
Clasp'd, kiss'd him, wail'd : he answer'd, ' Care not thou ! 
Thy duty ? What is duty ? Fare thee well ! ' 280 



1 30 CHARACTER-PIECES 



ST. AGNES' EVE 

Deep on the convent-roof the snows 

Are sparkling to the moon : 
My breath to heaven like vapour goes : 

May my soul follow soon ! 
The shadows of the convent-towers 5 

Slant down the snowy sward, 
Still creeping with the creeping hours 

That lead me to my Lord : 
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear 

As are the frosty skies, 10 

Or this first snowdrop of the year 

That in my bosom lies. 

As these white robes are soil'd and dark, 

To yonder shining ground ; 
As this pale taper's earthly spark, 15 

To yonder argent round ; 
So shows my soul before the Lamb, 

My spirit before Thee ; 
So in mine earthly house I am. 

To that I hope to be. 20 

Break up the heavens, O Lord ! and far, 

Thro' all yon starlight keen. 
Draw me, thy bride, a ghttering star, 

In raiment white and clean. 

He lifts me to the golden doors ; 25 

The flashes come and go ; 
All heaven bursts her starry floors, 

And strows her lights below. 



SIR GALAHAD 131 

And deepens on and up ! the gates 

Roll back, and far within 30 

For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, 

To make me pure of sin. 
The sabbaths of Eternity, 

One sabbath deep and wide — 
A light upon the shining sea — 35 

The Bridegroom with his l)ride ! 



SIR CxALAHAD 

My good blade carves the casques of men, 

My tough lance thrusteth sure, 
My strength is as the strengtl»of ten, 

Because my heart is pure. 
The shattering trumpet shrilleth high, 

The hard brands shiver on the steel. 
The splinter'd spear-shafts crack and fly, 

The horse and rider reel : 
They reel, they roll in clanging lists. 

And when the tide of combat stands. 
Perfume and flowers fall in showers. 

That lightly rain from ladies' hands. 

How sweet are looks that ladies bend 

On whom their favours fall ! 
For them I battle till the end, 

To save from shame and thrall : 
But all my heart is drawn above, 

My knees are bow'd in crypt and shrine 
I never felt the kiss of love, 

Nor maiden's hand in mine. 



132 CHARACTER-PIECES 

More bounteous aspects on me beam, 
Me mightier transports move and thrill ; 

So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer 
A virgin heart in work and will. 

When down the stormy crescent goes, 

A light before me swims, 
Between dark stems the forest glows, 

I hear a noise of hymns : 
Then by some secret shrine I ride ; 

I hear a voice but none are there ; 
The stalls are .void, the doors are wide, 

The tapers burning fair. 
Fair gleams the snowy altar-cloth, 

The siker vessels sparkle clean. 
The shrilT'bell rings, the censer swings. 

And solemn chaunts resound between. 

Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres 

I find a magic bark ; 
I leap on board : no helmsman steers : 

I float till all is dark. 
A gentle sound, an awful light ! 

Three angels bear the holy Grail : 
With folded feet, in stoles of white. 

On sleeping wings they sail. 
Ah, blessed vision ! blood of God ! 

My spirit beats her mortal bars, 
As down dark tides the glory slides. 

And star-Uke mingles with the stars. 

When on my goodly charger borne 

Thro' dreaming towns I go. 
The cock crows ere the Christmas morn, 

The streets are dumb with snow. 



SIR GALAHAD 133 

The tempest crackles on the leads, 

And, ringing, springs from brand and mail ; 
But o'er the dark a glory spreads, 55 

And gilds the driving hail. 
I leave the plain, I climb the height ; 

No branchy thicket shelter yields ; 
But blessed forms in whistling storms 

Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields. 60 

A maiden knight — to me is given 

Such hope, I know not fear ; 
I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven 

That often meet me here. 
I muse on joy that will not cease, 65 

Pure spaces clothed in living beams, 
Pure lilies of eternal peace, 

Whose odours haunt my dreams ; 
And, stricken by an angel's hand. 

This mortal armour that I wear, 70 

This weight and size, this heart and eyes, 

Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air. 

The clouds are broken in* the sky. 

And thro' the mountain-walls 
A rolUng organ-harmony 75 

Swells up, and shakes and falls. 
Then move the trees, the copses nod. 

Wings flutter, voices hover clear : 
' O just and faithful knight of God ! 

Ride on ! the prize is near.' 80 

So pass I hostel, hall, and grange ; 

By bridge and ford, by park and pale, 
AU-arm'd I ride, whate'er betide, 

Until I find the holy Grail. 



134 CHARACTER-PIECES 



NORTHERN FARMER 



OLD STYLE 



Wheer 'asta bean saw long and mea liggin' 'ere aloan? 
Noorse ? thourt nowt o' a noorse : whoy, Doctor's abean a,n' 

agoan : 
Says that I moant 'a naw moor aale : but I beant a fool : 
Git ma my aale, fur I beant a-gawin' to break my rule. 



Doctors, they knaws nowt, fur a says what 's nawways true : 5 

Naw soort o' koind o' use to saay the things that a do. 
I 've 'ed my point o' aale ivry noight sin' I bean 'ere. 
An' I 've 'ed my quart ivry market-noight for foorty year. 

Ill 

Parson 's a bean loikewoise, an' a sittin' 'ere o' my bed. 

'The amoighty 's a taakin 0' you to 'issen, my friend,' a said, 10 

An' a towd ma my sins, an's toithe were due, an' I gied it in 

hond ; 
I done moy duty boy 'um, as I 'a done boy the lond. 

IV 

Larn'd a ma' bea. I reckons I 'annot sa mooch to larn. 

But a cast oop, thot a did, 'bout Bessy Harris's barne. 

Thaw a knaws I hallus voated wi' Squoire an' choorch an' 15 

staate. 
An' i' the woost o' toimes I wur niver agin the raate. 



NORTHERN FARMER 135 



An' I hallus coom'd to 's chooch afoor moy Sally wur dead, 
An' 'eard 'um a bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower my 

'ead, 
An' 1 niver knaw'd whot a mean'd but I thowt a 'ad summut 

to saay, 
An' I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said an' I coom'd awaay. 20 

VI 

Bessy Marris's barne ! tha knaws she laaid it to mea. 
Mowt a bean, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, shea. 
'Siver, I kep 'um, I kep 'um, my lass, tha mun understond ; 
I done moy duty boy 'um as I 'a done boy the lond. 



VII 

But Parson a cooms an' a goas, an' a says it eiisy an' freea 25 
' The amoighty 's a taiikin o' you to 'issen, my friend,' says 'ea. 
I weant saay men be loiars, thaw summun said it in 'aiiste : 
But 'e reads wonn sarmin a weeiik, an' I 'a stubb'd Thurnaby 
waaste. 

VIII 

D' ya moind the waaste, my lass? naw, naw, tha was not born 

then ; 
Theer wur a boggle in it, I often 'eiird 'um mysen ; 30 

Moast loike a butter-bump, fur I 'eiird 'um about an' about. 
But I stubb'd 'um oop wi' the lot, an' raiived an' rembled 'um 

out. 

IX 

Reaper's it wur ; fo' they fun 'um theer a-laaid of 'is faace 
Down i' the woild 'enemies afoor I coom'd to the plaace. 



1 36 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Noaks or Thimbleby — toaner 'ed shot 'um as dead as a 35 

naail. 
Noaks wur 'ang'd for it oop at 'soize — but git ma my aale. 



Dubbut loook at the waaste : theer warn't not feead for a 

cow; 
Nowt at all but bracken an' fuzz, an' loook at it now — 
Warnt worth nowt a haacre, an' now theer 's lots o' feead, 
Fourscoor yows upon it an' some on it down i' seead. 40 



XI 

Nobbut a bit on it 's left, an' I mean'd to 'a stubb'd it 

at fall, 
Done it ta-year I mean'd, an' runn'd plow thruff it an' all. 
If godamoighty an' parson 'ud nobbut let ma aloan, 
Mea, wi' haate hoonderd haacre o' Squoire's, an' lond o' my 

oan. 

XII 

Do godamoighty knaw what a 's doing a-taakin' o' mea? 45 

I beant wonn as saws 'ere a bean an' yonder a pea ; 

An' Squoire 'ull be sa mad an' all — a' dear a' dear ! 

And I 'a managed for Squoire coom Michaelmas thutty year. 



XIII 

A mowt 'a taaen owd Joanes, as 'ant not a 'aapoth o' sense. 
Or a mowt 'a taaen young Robins — a niver mended a fence : 50 
But godamoighty a moost taake mea an' taake ma now . 
Wi' aaf the cows to cauve an' Thumaby hoalms to plow ! 



NORTHERN FARMER 137 

XIV 

Loook 'ow quoloty smoiles when they seeas ma a passin' boy, 

Says to thesse'n naw doubt ' what a man a bea sewer-loy ! ' 

Fur they knaws what I bean to Squoire sin fust a coom'd to the 55 

'All; 
I done moy duty by Squoire an' I done moy duty boy hall. 



XV 

Squoire 's i' Lunnon, an' summun I reckons 'ull 'a to wroite, 
For whoa 's to howd the lond ater mea thot muddles ma 

quoit ; 
Sartin-sewer I bea, thot a weant niver give it to Joanes, 
Naw, nor a moant to Robins — a niver rembles the stoans. 60 



XVI 

But summun 'ull come ater mea mayhap wi' 'is kittle o' steam 
Huzzin' an' maazin' the blessed fealds wi' the Divil's oan 

team. 
Sin' I mun doy I mun doy, thaw loife they says is sweet, 
But sin' I mun doy I mun doy, for I couldn abear to see it. 



XVII 

What atta stannin' theer fur, an' doesn bring ma the aale ? 65 

Doctor 's a 'toattler, lass, an a 's hallus i' the owd taale ; 

I weant break rules fur Doctor, a knaws naw moor nor a 

floy; 
Git ma my aale I tell tha, an' if I mun doy I mun doy. 



138 CHARACTER-PIECES 



NORTHERN FARMER 



NEW STYLE 



Dos n't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay? 
Proputty, proputty, proputty — that 's what I 'ears 'em saay. 
Proputty, proputty, proputty — Sam, thou 's an ass for thy 

paains : 
Theer 's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braains. 



Woa — theer 's a craw to pluck wi' tha, Sam: yon 's parson's 5 

'ouse — 
Do sn't thou knaw that a man mun be eather a man or a mouse ? 
Time to think on it then ; for thou '11 be twenty to weeak. 
Proputty, proputty — woa then woa — let ma 'ear mysen speak. 

Ill 

Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as bean a-talkin' o' thee ; 

Thou 's bean talkin' to muther, an' she bean a tellin' it me. 10 

Thou '11 not marry for munny — thou 's sweet upo' parson's 

lass — 
Noa — thou '11 marry for luvv — an' we boath on us thinks tha 

an ass. 

IV 

Seea'd her todaay goa by — Saaint's-daay — they was ringing 

the bells. 
She 's a beauty thou thinks — an' soa is scoors o' gells. 



NORTHERN FARMER 139 

Them as 'as miinny an' all — wot 's a beauty ? — the flower as 1 5 

blaws. 
But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws. 



Do'ant be stunt : taake time : I knaws what maakes tha sa 

mad. 
Warn't I craazed fur the lasses myse'n when I wur a lad ? 
But I knaw'd a Quaaker feller as often 'as towd ma this : 
' Doant thou marry for munny, but goa wheer munny is ! ' 



VI 

An' I went wheer munny war : an' thy muther coom to 'and, 
Wi' lots o' munny laaid by, an' a nicetish bit o' land. 
Maaybe she warn't a beauty : — I niver giv it a thowt — 
But warn't she as good to cuddle an' kiss as a lass as 'ant 
nowt ? 

VII 

Parson's lass 'ant nowt, an' she weant 'a nowt when 'e 's dead, 25 
Mun be a guvness, lad, or summut, and addle her bread : 
Why? fur 'e 's nobbut a curate, an' weant niver git hisse'n 

clear. 
An' 'e maade the bed as 'e ligs on afoor 'e coom'd to the shere. 



VIII 

An' thin 'e coom'd to the parish wi' lots o' Varsity debt, 
Stook to his taail they did, an' 'e 'ant got shut on 'em yet. 30 
An' 'e ligs on 'is back i' the grip, wi' noan to lend 'im a shuvv, 
Woorse nor a far-welter'd yowe : fur, Sammy, 'e married fur 
luvv. 



I40 CHARACTER-PIECES 



IX 



Luvv? what's luw? thou can hivv thy lass an' 'ermunny too, 
Maakin' 'em goa togither as they 've good right to do. 
Could'n I luvv thy muther by cause o' 'er munny laaid by? 35 
Naay — fur I luvv'd 'er a vast sight moor fur it : reason why. 



Ay, an' thy muther says thou wants to marry the lass, 

Cooms of a gentleman burn : an' we boath on us thinks tha 

an ass. 
Woa then, proputty, wiltha? — an ass as near as mays nowt — 
Woa then, wiltha? dangtha ! — the bees is as fell as owt. 40 

XI 

Break me a bit o' the esh for his 'ead, lad, out o' the fence ! 
Gentleman burn ! what 's gentleman burn ? is it shilHns an' 

pence? 
Proputty, proputty 's ivrything 'ere, an', Sammy, I 'm blest 
If it isn't the saame oop yonder, fur them as 'as it 's the best. 

XII 

Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steals, 45 

Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taakes their regular meals. 
Noa, but it 's them as niver knaws wheer a meal 's to be 'ad. 
Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad. 

XIII 

Them or thir feythers, tha sees, mun 'a bean a laazy lot. 

Fur work mun 'a gone to the gittin' whiniver munny was got. 50 

Feyther 'ad ammost nowt ; leastways 'is munny was 'id. 

But 'e tued an' moil'd 'iss^n dead, an' 'e died a good un, 'e did. 



LOCKSLEY HALL 141 



XIV 



Loook thou theer wheer Wrigglesby beck cooms out by the 'ill ! 
Feyther run oop to the farm, an' I runs oop to the mill ; 
An' I '11 run oop to the brig, an' that thou '11 live to see ; 55 

And if thou marries a good un I '11 leave the land to thee. 



XV 



Thim 's my noations, Sammy, vvheerby I means to stick ; 
But if thou marries a bad un, I '11 leave the land to Dick. — 
Coom oop, proputty, proputty — that 's what I 'ears 'im saay — 
Proputty, proputty, proputty — canter an' canter awaay. 60 



LOCKSLEY HALL 

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn : 
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle- 
horn. 

'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, 
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall ; 

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts, 5 
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts. 

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, 
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. 

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade. 
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. 10 

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime 
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time ; 



142 



CHARACTER-PIECES 



When the centuries behind me hke a fruitful land reposed ; 
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed : 

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see ; 15 

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would 
be.— 

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast ; 
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest ; 

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove ; 
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of 20 
love. 

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one 

so young, 
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. 

And I said, ' My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth 

to me, 
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.' 

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light, 25 
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night. 

And she turn'd — her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of 

sighs — 
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes — 

Saying, ' I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me 

wrong ; ' 
Saying, ' Dost thou love me, cousin ? ' weeping, ' I have loved 30 

thee long.' 



LOCKSLEY HALL 143 

Love took up the glass of Time, and tiirn'd it in his glowing 

hands ; 
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. 

" Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords 

with might ; 
y^ Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out 

of sight. 

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, 35 
And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fullness of the 
Spring. 

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, 
And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips. 

O my cousin, shallow-hearted ! O my Amy, mine no more ! 

O the dreary, dreary moorland ! O the barren, barren shore ! 40 

P^alser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung, 
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue ! 

Is it well to wish thee hai)py ? — having known me — to 

decline 
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine ! 

Yet it shall be : thou shalt lower to his level day by day, 45 

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathise with 
clay. 

As the husband is, the wife is : thou art mated with a clown. 
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee 
down. 



144 CHARACTER-PIECES 

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel 

force, 
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. 50 

What is this ? his eyes are heavy : think not they are glazed 

with wine. 
Go to him : it is thy duty : kiss him : take his hand in thine. 

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought : 
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter 
thought. 

He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand — 55 
Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my 
hand ! 

Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace, 
Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace. 

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth ! 
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth ! 60 

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule ! 
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the 
fool! 

Well — 't is well that I should bluster ! — Hadst thou less un- 
worthy proved — 

Would to God — for I had loved thee more than ever wife was 
loved. 

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter 65 

fruit? 
I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root. 



LOCKSLEY HALL 145 

Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should 

come 
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home. 

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind? 

Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind ? 70 

I remember one that perish'd : sweetly did she speak and 

move : 
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love. 

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore? 
No — she never loved me truly : love is love for evermore. 

Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils ! this is truth the poet sings, 75 
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering-happier things. 

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to 

proof. 
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof. 

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall. 
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and 80 
fall. 

Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken 

sleep, 
To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt 

weep. 

Thou shalt hear the * Never, never,' whisper'd by the phantom 

years, 
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears ; 



146 CHARACTER-PIECES 

And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain. 85 
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow : get thee to thy rest again. 

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace ; for a tender voice will cry. 
'T is a purer life than thine ; a lip to drain thy trouble dry. 

Baby lips will laugh me down : my latest rival brings thee rest. 
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast. 9° 

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due. 
Half is thine and half is his : it will be worthy of the two. 

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, 
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's 
heart. 

' They were dangerous guides the feelings — she herself was 95 ' 

not exempt — 
Truly, she herself had suffer'd ' — Perish in thy self-contempt ! 



Overlive it — lower yet — be happy ! wherefore should 
I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair. 



I care ? 



What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like . 

these? I 

Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys. 100 

Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow. r 
I have but an angry fancy : what is that which I should do? 

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground, 
When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with 
sound. 



LOCKSLEY HALL . 147 

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels, 105 
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels. 

Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page. 
Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother- Age ! 

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife. 
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my hfe ; no 

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would 

yield, 
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field. 

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn. 
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn ; 

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, 1 1 5 
Underneath the fight he looks at, in among the throngs of 
men : 

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something 

new : 
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they 

shall do : 

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see. 

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ; 120 

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails. 
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ; 

I Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly 

'^ dew 

— From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ; 



148 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing 125 
warm, 

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder- 
storm ; 

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were 
furl'd 
i^_ In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in 

awe, 
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law. 130 

So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, 
Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced 
eye ; 

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint : 
Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to 
point : 

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a Hon creeping nigher, 135 

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. 

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the 
suns. 

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, 
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's? 140 

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the 

shore, 
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. 



LOCKSLEY HALL 149 

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden 

breast, 
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. 

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle- 145 

horn, 
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn : 

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string? 
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. 

Weakness to be wroth with weakness ! woman's pleasure, 

woman's pain — 
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower 150 

brain : 

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with 

mine, 
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine — 

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some 

retreat 
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat ; 

Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd ; — 155 
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward. 

Or to burst all links of habit — there to wander far away. 
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. 

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, 
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of 160 
Paradise. 



I50 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, 
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from 
the crag ; 

Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited 

tree — 
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. 

There me thinks would be enjoyment more than in this march 165 

of mind. 
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake 

mankind. 

There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and 

breathing space ; 
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. 

Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall 

run, 
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the 170 

sun ; 

Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the 

brooks. 
Not with bhnded eyesight poring over miserable books — 

Fool, again the dream, the fancy ! but I know my words are 

wild, 
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. 

I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, 175 
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains ! 



LOCKSLEY HALL 151 

Mated with a squalid savage — what to me were sun or cHme ? 
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time — 

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one, 
Than that earth should stand at gaze hke Joshua's moon in 180 
Ajalon ! 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us 

range. 
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of 

change. 

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day : 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. I 

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life 185 

begun : 
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh 

the Sun. 

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set. 
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet. 

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall ! 
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree 190 
fall. 

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and 

holt, 
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. 

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow ; 
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go. 



1 52 CHARACTER-PIECES 



LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 

Of me you shall not win renown : 
You thought to break a country heart 

For pastime, ere you went to town. 
At me you smiled, but unbeguiled 5 

I saw the snare, and I retired : 
The daughter of a hundred Earls, 

You are not one to be desired. 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 

I know you proud to bear your name, 10 

Your pride is yet no mate for mine, 

Too proud to care from whence I came. 
Nor would I break for your sweet sake 

A heart that dotes on truer charms. 
A simple maiden in her flower 15 

Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms. 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 

Some meeker pupil you must find. 
For were you queen of all that is, 

I could not stoop to such a mind. 20 

You sought to prove how I could love. 

And my disdain is my reply. 
The lion on your old stone gates 

Is hot more cold to you than I. 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 25 

You put strange memories in my head. 



LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE 153 

Not thrice your branching limes have blown 
Since I beheld young Laurence dead. 

Oh your sweet eyes, your low replies : 

A great enchantress you may be; 30 

But there was that across his throat 
Which you had hardly cared to see. 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 

When thus he met his mother^s view. 
She had the passions of her kind, 35 

She spake some certain truths of you. 
Indeed I heard one bitter word 

That scarce is fit for you to hear ; 
Her manners had not that repose 

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. 40 

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 

There stands a spectre in your hall : 
The guilt of blood is at your door: 

You changed a wholesome heart to gall. 
You held your course without remorse, 45 

To make him trust his modest worth, 
And, last, you fix'd a vacant stare. 

And slew him with your noble birth. 



50 



Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere, 

From yon blue heavens above us bent 
The gardener Adam and his wife 

Smile at the claims of long descent. 
Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 

'Tis only noble to be good. 
Kind hearts are more than coronets, 55 

And simple faith than Norman blood. 



154 CHARACTER-PIECES 

I know you, Clara Vere de Vere, 

You pine among your halls and towers : 
The languid light of your proud eyes 

Is wearied of the rolling hours. 60 

In glowing health, with boundless wealth, 

But sickening of a vague disease, 
You know so ill to deal with time, 

You needs must play such pranks as these. 

Clara, Clara Vere de Vere, 65 

If time be heavy on your hands. 
Are there no beggars at your gate. 

Nor any poor about your lands? 
Oh ! teach the orphan-boy to read, 

Or teach the orphan-girl to sew, 70 

Pray heaven for a human heart, 

And let the fooUsh yeoman go. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 155 

SELECTIONS FROM MAUD; A MONODRAMA 
Part I 



A VOICE by the cedar tree 

In the meadow under the Hall ! 

She is singing an air that is known to me, 

A passionate ballad gallant and gay, 

A martial song like a trumpet's call ! 

Singing alone in the morning of life, 

In the happy morning of life and of May, 

Singing of men that in battle array. 

Ready in heart and ready in hand, 

March with banner and bugle and fife 

To the death, for their native land. 



Maud with her exquisite face. 

And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky. 

And feet like sunny gems on an English green, 

Maud in the light of her youth and her grace, 15 

Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die. 

Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean. 

And myself so languid and base. 

ni 

Silence, beautiful voice ! 

Be still, for you only trouble the mind 20 

With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, 

A glory I shall not find. 



1 56 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Still ! I will hear you no more, 
For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice 
But to move to the meadow and fall before 
Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore, 
Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind, 
Not her, not her, but a voice. 



XI 



let the solid ground 
Not fail beneath my feet 

Before my life has found 

What some have found so sweet ; 
I'hen let come what come may, 
What matter if I go mad, 

1 shall have had my day. 



Let the sweet heavens endure, 
Not close and darken above me 

Before I am quite quite sure 
That there is one to love me ; 

Then let come what come may 

To a life that has been so sad, 

I shall have had my day. 

XII 



Birds in the high Hall-garden 
When twihght was falling, 

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, 
They were crying and calling. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 157 



Where was Maud ? in our wood ; 

And I, who else, was with her, 
Gathering woodland lilies. 

Myriads blow together. 



in 

Birds in our wood sang 
Ringing thro' the valleys, 

Maud is here, here, here 
In among the lilies. 



I kiss'd her slender hand, 

She took the kiss sedately ; 
Maud is not seventeen, 15 

But she is tall and statelv. 



I to cry out on pride 

Who have won her favour ! 
O Maud were sure of Heaven 

If lowliness could save her. 



VI 

I know the way she went 
Home with her maiden posy, 

For her feet have touch'd the meadows 
And left the daisies rosy. 



158 CHARACTER-PIECES 



VII 



Birds in the high Hall-garden 25 

Were crying and calling to her, 
Where is Maud, Maud, Maud? 

One is come to woo her. 

VIII 

Look, a horse at the door. 

And little King Charley snarling, 30 

Go back, my lord, across the moor, 

You are not her darling. 

XVII 

Go not, happy day. 

From the shining fields, 
Go not, happy day, 

Till the maiden yields. 
Rosy is the West, 5 

Rosy is the South, 
Roses are her cheeks. 

And a rose her mouth 
When the happy Yes 

Falters from her lips, 10 

Pass and blush the news 

Over glowing ships; 
Over blowing seas, 

Over seas at rest. 
Pass the happy news, 15 

Blush it thro' the West; 
Till the red man dance 

By his red cedar-tree. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 159 

And the red man's babe 

Leap, beyond the sea. 20 

Blush from West to East, 

Blush from East to West, 
Till the West is East, 

Blush it thro' the West. 
Rosy is the West, 25 

Rosy is the South, 
Roses are her cheeks. 

And a rose her mouth. 

XVIII 



I have led her home, my love, my only friend. 

There is none like her, none. 

And never yet so warmly ran my blood 

And sweetly, on and on, 

Calming itself to the long- wish'd- for end, 5 

Full to the banks, close on the promised good. 

II 
None like her, none. 

Just now the dry-tongued laurels' pattering talk 
Seem'd her light foot along the garden walk, 
And shook my heart to think she comes once more ; 10 
But even then I heard her close the door, 
The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone. 

Ill 

There is none like her, none. 

Nor will be when our summers have deceased. 

O, art thou sighing for Lebanon 15 

In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East, 



l60 CHARACTER-PIECES 

Sighing for Lebanon, 

Dark cedar, tho' thy limbs have here increased, 

Upon a pastoral slope as fair, 

And looking to the South, and fed 

With honey'd rain and delicate air, 

And haunted by the starry head 

Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate, 

And made my Hfe a perfumed altar-flame ; 

And over whom thy darkness must have spread 

With such delight as theirs of old, thy great 

Forefathers of the thornless garden, there 

Shadowing the snow-limb'd Eve from whom she came. 



Here will I lie, while these long branches sway, 

And you fair stars that crown a happy day 30 

Go in and out as if at merry play, 

Who am no more so all forlorn, 

As when it seem'd far better to be born 

To labour and the mattock-harden'd hand, 

Than nursed at ease and brought to understand 35 

A sad astrology, the boundless plan 

That makes you tyrants in your iron skies, 

Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes. 

Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand 

His nothingness into man. 40 



But now shine on, and what care I, 

Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl 

The countercharm of space and hollow sky, 

And do accept my madness, and would die 

To save from some slight shame one simple girl. 45 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD i6l 

VI 

Would die ; for sullen-seeming Death may give 

More life to Love than is or ever was 

In our low world, where yet 't is sweet to live. 

Let no one ask me how it came to pass ; 

It seems that I am happy, that to me 50 

A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, 

A purer sapphire melts into the sea. 



Not die ; but live a Hfe of truest breath, 

And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs. 

O, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs, 55 

Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death? 

Make answer, Maud my bliss, 

Maud made my Maud by that long loving kiss, 

Life of my life, wilt thou not answer this? 

'The dusky strand of Death inwoven here 60 

With dear Love's tie, makes Love himself more dear.' 

VIII 

Is that enchanted moan only the swell 

Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay? 

And hark the clock within, the silver knell 

Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white, 65 

And died to live, long as my pulses play ; 

But now by this my love has closed her sight 

And given false death her hand, and stol'n away 

To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell 

Among the fragments of the golden day. 70 

May nothing there her maiden grace affright ! 

Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell. 



62 CHARACTER-PIECES 

My bride to be, my evermore delight, 

My own heart's heart, my ownest own, farewell ; 

It is but for a httle space I go : 75 

And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell 

Beat to the noiseless music of the night ! 

Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow 

Of your soft splendours that you look so bright? 

/ have climb'd nearer out of lonely Hell. 80 

Beat, happy stars, timing with, things below. 

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell, 

Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe 

That seems to draw — but it shall not be so : 

Let all be well, be well. 85 



XXII 



Come into the garden, Maud, 

For the black bat, night, has flown. 

Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate alone ; 

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad; 
And the musk of the rose is blown. 



For a breeze of morning moves. 

And the planet of Love is on high, 

Beginning to faint in the light that she loves 
On a bed of daffodil sky, 

To faint in the light of the sun she loves, 
To faint in his light, and to die. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 163 

III 

All night have the roses heard 

The flute, violin, bassoon ; 
All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd 

To the dancers dancing in tune ; 
Till a silence fell with the waking bird, 

And a hush with the setting moon. 



I said to the lily, 'There is but one 

With whom she has heart to be gay. 20 

When will the dancers leave her alone? 

She is weary of dance and play.' 
Now half to the setting moon are gone, 

And half to the rising day ; 
Low on the sand and loud on the stone 25 

The last wheel echoes away. 



I said to the rose, 'The brief night goes 

In babble and revel and wine. 
O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, 

For one that will never be thine? ' 30 

But mine, but mine,' so I sware to the rose, 

' For ever and ever, mine.' 

VI 

And the soul of the rose went into my blood, 

As the music clash'd in the hall ; 
And long by the garden lake I stood, 35 

For I heard your rivulet fall 
From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, 

Our wood, that is dearer than all ; 



l64 CHARACTER-PIECES 

VII 

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet 

That whenever a March-wind sighs 40 

He sets the jewel-print of your feet 
In violets blue as your eyes, 

To the woody hollows in which we meet 
And the valleys of Paradise. 



The slender acacia would not shake 45 

One long milk-bloom on the tree ; 
The white lake-blossom fell into the lake 

As the pimpernel dozed on the lea ; 
But the rose was awake all night for your sake, 

Knowing your promise to me ; 50 

The HUes and roses were all awake, 

They sigh'd for the dawn and thee. 

IX 

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, 

Come hither, the dances are done. 
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, 55 

Queen lily and rose in one ; 
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, 

To the flowers, and be their sun. 



There has fallen a splendid tear 

From the passion-flower at the gate. 60 

She is coming, my dove, my dear ; 

She is coming, my Hfe, my fate ; 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 165 

The red rose cries, * She is near, she is near ; ' 
And the white rose weeps, ^ She is late ; ' 

The larkspur hstens, ' I hear, I hear ; ' 65 

And the lily whispers, ' I wait.' 

XI 

She is coming, my own, my sweet ; 

Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat. 

Were it earth in an earthy bed ; 70 

My dust would hear her and beat, 

Had I lain for a century dead; 
Would start and tremble under her feet, 

And blossom in purple and red. 



Part II 

II 

I 
See what a lovely shell. 
Small and pure as a pearl, 
Lying close to my foot, 
Frail, but a work divine, 
Made so fairily well 
With dehcate spire and whorl, 
How exquisitely minute, 
A miracle of design ! 

II 

What is it? a learned man 
Could give it a clumsy name. 
Let him name it who can, 
The beauty would be the same. 



l66 CHARACTER-PIECES 



in 



The tiny cell is forlorn, 

Void of the little living will 

That made it stir on the shore. 15 

Did he stand at the diamond door 

Of his house in a rainbow frill? 

Did he push, when he was uncurl'd, 

A golden foot or a fairy horn 

Thro' his dim water-world? 20 

IV 

Slight, to be crush'd with a tap 

Of my finger-nail on the sand. 

Small, but a work divine. 

Frail, but of force to withstand, 

Year upon year, the shock 25 

Of cataract seas that snap 

The three decker's oaken spine 

Athwart the ledges of rock. 

Here on the Breton strand ! 



Ill 



Courage, poor heart of stone ! 

I will not ask thee why ' 

Thou canst not understand I 

That thou art left for ever alone : ! 

Courage, poor stupid heart of stone. — 5 

Or if I ask thee why, ! 

Care not thou to reply : ^ ! 

She is but dead, and the time is at hand 
When thou shalt more than die. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 167 



IV 



(In this section the text is that of the first edition, as found in 
" Stanzas " from The Tribute^ ^'^yi-) 

Oh! that 'twere possible, 

After long grief and pain, 
To find the arms of my true-love 

Round me once again ! 

When I was wont to meet her 
In the silent woody places 

Of the land that gave me birth. 
We stood tranced in long embraces, 
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter, 
Than any thing on earth. 

A shadow flits before me — 

Not thou, but like to thee. 
Ah God ! that it were possible 

For one short hour to see 
The souls we loved, that they might tell us 

What and where they be. 

It leads me forth at Evening, 

It lightly winds and steals 
In a cold white robe before me, 

When all my spirit reels 
At the shouts, the leagues of lights. 

And the roaring of the wheels. 

Half the night I waste in sighs, 
In a wakeful doze I sorrow 



l68 CHARACTER-PIECES 

For the hand, the lips, the eyes — 25 

For the meeting of to-morrow, 
The dehght of happy laughter, 
The delight of low repHes. 

Do I hear the pleasant ditty. 

That I heard her chant of old? 30 

But I wake — my dream is fled. 
Without knowledge, without pity — 
In the shuddering dawn behold. 

By the curtains of my bed, 
That abiding phantom cold. 35 

Then I rise : the eave-drops fall 
And the yellow-vapours choke. 
The great city sounding wide ; 
The day comes — a dull red ball, 

Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke, 40 

On the misty river-tide. 

Thro' the hubbub of the market 

I steal, a wasted frame ; 
It crosseth here, it crosseth there — 
Thro' all the crowd, confused and loud, 45 

The shadow still the same ; 
And on my heavy eyelids 

My anguish hangs like shame. 

Alas for her that met me. 

That heard me softly call — 50 

Came glimmering thro' the laurels 

At the quiet even-fall. 
In the garden by the turrets 

Of the old Manorial Hall. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 169 

Then the broad light glares and beats, 55 

And the sunk eye flits and fleets, 
And will not let me be. 

I loathe the squares and streets, 
And the faces that one meets, 

Hearts with no love for me ; 60 

Always I long to creep 
To some still cavern deep, 
And to weep and weep and weep 

My whole soul out to thee. 

Get thee hence, nor come again 65 

Pass and cease to move about — 
Pass, thou death-Hke type of pain, 

Mix not memory with doubt. 
'Tis the blot upon the brain 

That will show itself without. 70 

Would the happy Spirit descend 
In the chamber or the street 
As she looks among the blest; 
Should I fear to greet my friend, 

Or to ask her, ''Take me, sweet, 75 

To the region of thy rest." 

But she tarries in her place, 
And I paint the beauteous face 
Of the maiden, that I lost, 

In my inner eyes again, 80 

Lest my heart be overborne 
By the thing I hold in scorn. 
By a dull mechanic ghost 
And a juggle of the brain. 



I70 CHARACTER-PIECES 

I can shadow forth my bride 85 

As I knew her fair and kind, 
As I woo'd her for my wife ; 
She is lovely by my side 

In the silence of my Hfe — 
'Tis a phantom of the mind. 90 

'T is a phantom fair and good ; 
I can call it to my side, 

So to guard my life from ill, 
Tho' its ghastly sister glide 

And be moved around me still 95 

With the moving of the blood, 

That is moved not of the will. 

L,et it pass, the dreary brow, 

Let the dismal face go by. 
Will it lead me to the grave? 100 

Then I lose it : it will fly : 
Can it overlast the nerves? 

Can it overlive the eye? 
But the other, like a star, 
Thro' the channel windeth far 105 

Till it fade and fail and die, 
To its Archetype that waits. 
Clad in hght by golden gates — 
Clad in light the Spirit waits 

To embrace me in the sky. no 



RIZPAH 

RIZPAH , 
17— 



Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea — 
And Willy's voice in the wind, ' O mother, come out to me.' 
Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot 

go? 
For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at 

the snow. 



We should be seen, my dear ; they would spy us out of the 5 

town. 
The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the 

down, 
When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of 

the chain. 
And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched 

with the rain. 



Ill 

Anything fallen again ? nay — what was there left to fall ? 

I have taken them home, I have number'd the bones, I have 10 

hidden them all. 
What am I saying? and what are yoii? do you come as a 

spy? 
Falls? what falls? who knows? As the tree falls so must 

it lie. 



172 CHARACTER-PIECES 

IV 

Who let her in ? how long has she been ? you — what have you 

heard ? 
Why did you sit so quiet? you never have spoken a word. 
O — to pray with me — yes — a lady — none of their spies — 1 5 
But the night has crept into my heart, and begun to darken my 

eyes. 



Ah — you, that have lived so soft, what should you know of 

the night, 
The blast and the burning shame and the bitter frost and the 

fright? 
I have done it, while you were asleep — you were only made 

for the day. 
I have gather'd my baby together — and now you may go your 20 

way. 

VI 

Nay — for it 's kind of you. Madam, to sit by an old dying wife. 
But say nothing hard of my boy, I have only an hour of life. 
I kiss'd my boy in the prison, before he went out to die. 
* They dared me to do it,' he said, and he never has told me 

a lie. 
I whipt him for robbing an orchard once when he was but a 25 

child — 
*The farmer dared me to do it,' he said; he was always so 

wild — 
And idle — and could n't be idle — my Willy — he never could 

rest. 
The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been 

one of his best. 



RIZPAH 173 

VII 

But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would 

let him be good ; 
They swore that he dare not rob the mail, and he swore that 30 

he would ; 
And he took no life, but he took one purse, and when all was 

done 
He flung it among his fellows — I '11 none of it, said my son. 

VIII 

I came into court to the Judge and the lawyers. I told them 

my tale, 
God's own truth — but they kill'd him, they kill'd him for rob- 
bing the mail. 
They hang'd him in chains for a show — we had always borne 35 

a good name — 
To be hang'd for a thief — and then put away — isn't that 

enough shame? 
Dust to dust — low down — let us hide ! but they set him so 

high 
That all the ships of the world could stare at him, passing by. 
God 'ill pardon the hell-black raven and horrible fowls of 

the air, 
But not the black heart of the lawyer who kill'd him and hang'd 40 

him there. 

IX 

And the jailer forced me away. I had bid him my last goodbye ; 
They had fasten'd the door of his cell. ' O mother ! ' I heard 

him cry. 
I could n't get back tho' I tried, he had something further to say. 
And now I never shall know it. The jailer forced me away. 



1/4 CHARACTER-PIECES 



Then since I could n't but hear that cry of my boy that was dead, 45 
They seized me and shut me up : they fasten'd me down on my 

bed. 
' Mother, O mother ! ' — he call'd in the dark to me year after 

year — 
They beat me for that, they beat me — you know that I could n't 

but hear ; 
And then at the last they found I had grown so stupid and still 
They let me abroad again — but the creatures had worked their 5° 

will. 

XI 

Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left — 
I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, will you call it a 

theft? — 
My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the bones that had 

laugh'd and had cried — 
Theirs ? O no ! they are mine — not theirs — they had moved 

in my side. 

XII 

Do you think I was scared by the bones? I kiss'd 'em, I buried 55 

'em all — 
I can't dig deep, I am old — in the night by the churchyard wall. 
My Willy 'ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 'ill 

sound ; 
But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground. 

XIII 

They would scratch him up — they would hang him again on 

the cursed tree. 
Sin? O yes — we are sinners, I know — let all that be, 60 



RIZPAH 175 

And read me a Bible verse of the Lord's good will toward 

men — 
' Full of compassion and mercy, the Lord ' — let me hear it 

again ; 
' Full of compassion and mercy — long-suffering.' Yes, O yes ! 
For the lawyer is born but to murder — the Saviour lives but to 

bless. 
He '11 never put on the black cap except for the worst of the 65 

worst. 
And the first may be last — I have heard it in church — and 

the last may be first. 
Suffering — O long-suffering — yes, as the Lord must know, 
Year after year in the mist and the wind and the shower and 

the snow. 

XIV 

Heard, have you ? what ? they have told you he never repented 

his sin. 
How do they know it? are t/icy his mother? are you of his 70 

kin? 
Heard ! have you ever heard, when the storm on the downs 

began, 
The wind that 'ill wail like a child and the sea that 'ill moan 

like a man ? 

XV 

Election, Election and Reprobation — it 's all very well. 

But I go to-night to my boy, and I shall not find him in 

Hell. 
For I cared so much for my boy that the Lord has look'd into 75 

my care. 
And He means me I 'm sure to be happy with Willy, I know 

not where. 



176 CHARACTER-PIECES 

XVI 

And if he be lost — but to save my soul, that is all your 

desire : 
Do you think that I care for my soul if my boy be gone to the 

fire? 
I have been with God in the dark — go, go, you may leave me 

alone — 
You never have borne a child — you are just as hard as a stone. 80 



XVII 

Madam, I beg your pardon ! I think that you mean to be 
kind. 

But I cannot hear what you say for my Willy's voice in the 
wind — 

The snow and the sky so bright — he used but to call in the 
dark, 

And he calls to me now from the church and not from the gib- 
bet — for hark ! 

Nay — you can hear it yourself — it is coming — shaking the 85 
walls — 

Willy — the moon 's in a cloud — Good-night. I am going. 
He calls. 



Ill 

SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII 

So was their sanctuary violated, 

So their fair college turn'd to hospital ; 

At first with all confusion : by and by 

Sweet order lived again with other laws : 

A kindlier influence reign 'd ; and everywhere 5 

Low voices with the ministering hand 

Hung round the sick : the maidens came, they talk'd. 

They sang, they read : till she not fair began 

To gather light, and she that was, became 

Her former beauty treble ; and to and fro 10 

With books, with flowers, with Angel offices, 

Like creatures native unto gracious act. 

And in their own clear element, they moved. 

But sadness on the soul of Ida fell, 
And hatred of her weakness, blent with shame. 15 

Old studies fail'd ; seldom she spoke : but oft 
Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours 
On that disastrous leaguer, swarms of men 
Darkening her female field : void was her use, 
And she as one that cHmbs a peak to gaze 20 

O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud 
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night, 
^77 



178 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore, 

And suck the blinding splendour from the sand, 

And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn 25 

Expunge the world : so fared she gazing there ; 

So blacken'd all her world in secret, blank 

And waste it seem'd and vain; till down she came, 

And found fair peace once more among the sick. 

And twilight dawn'd ; and morn by morn the lark 30 
Shot up and shrill'd in flickering gyres, but I 
Lay silent in the muffled cage of life : 
And twilight gloom'd ; and broader-grown the bowers 
Drew the great night into themselves, and Heaven, 
Star after star, arose and fell ; but I, 35 

Deeper than those weird doubts could reach me, lay 
Quite sunder'd from the moving Universe, 
Nor knew what eye was on me, nor the hand 
That nursed me, more than infants in their sleep. 



But I lay still, and with me oft she sat : 
Then came a change ; for sometimes I would catch 
Her hand in wild delirium, gripe it hard. 
And fling it like a viper off, and shriek 
' You are not Ida ; ' clasp it once again, 80 

And call her Ida, tho' I knew her not. 
And call her sweet, as if in irony. 
And call her hard and cold which seem'd a tnith : 
And still she fear'd that I should lose my mind. 
And often she believed that I should die : 85 

Till out of long frustration of her care. 
And pensive tendance in the all-weary noons. 
And watches in the dead, the dark, when clocks 



THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII 179 

Throbb'd thunder thro' the palace floors, or call'd 

On flying Time from all their silver tongues — 90 

And out of memories of her kindlier days, 

And sidelong glances at my father's grief, 

And at the happy lovers heart in heart — 

And out of hauntings of my spoken love, 

And lonely Hstenings to my mutter'd dream, 95 

And often feeling of the helpless hands. 

And wordless broodings on the wasted cheek — 

From all a closer interest flourish'd uj), 

Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these, 

Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears 100 

By some cold morning glacier ; frail at first 

And feeble, all unconscious of itself. 

But such as gather'd colour day by day. 

Last I woke sane, but well-nigh close to death 
For weakness : it was evening : silent light 105 

Slept on the painted walls, wherein were wrought 
Two grand designs ; for on one side arose 
The women up in wild revolt, and storm'd 
At the Oppian law. Titanic shapes, they cramm'd 
The forum, and half-crush'd among the rest no 

A dwarf-Hke Cato cower'd. On the other side 
Hortensia spoke against the tax ; behind, 
A train of dames : by axe and eagle sat, 
With all their foreheads drawn in Roman scowls. 
And half the wolfs-milk curdled in their veins, 115 

The fierce triumvirs ; and before them paused 
Hortensia pleading : angry was her face. 

I saw the forms : I knew not where I was : 
They did but look like hollow shows ; nor more 



l8o SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Sweet Ida : palm to palm she sat : the dew 120 

Dwelt in her eyes, and softer all her shape 

And rounder seem'd : I moved : I sigh'd : a touch 

Came round my wrist, and tears upon my hand : 

Then all for languor and self-pity ran 

Mine down my face, and with what Hfe I had, 125 

And like a flower that cannot all unfold, 

So drench'd it is with tempest, to the sun, 

Yet, as it may, turns toward him, I on her 

Fixt my faint eyes, and utter'd whisperingly : 

* If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream, 130 
I would but ask you to fulfil yourself: 
But if you be that Ida whom I knew, 
I ask you nothing : only, if a dream, 
Sweet dream, be perfect. I shall die to-night. 
Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.' 135 

I could no more, but lay Hke one in trance, 
That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends, 
And cannot speak, nor move, nor make one sign, 
But lies and dreads his doom. She turn'd ; she paused ; 
She stoop'd ; and out of languor leapt a cry; 140 

Leapt fiery Passion from the brinks of death ; 
And I believed that in the living world 
My spirit closed with Ida's at the lips ; 
Till back I fell, and from mine arms she rose 
Glowing all over noble shame ; and all 145 

Her falser self slipt from her like a robe. 
And left her woman, lovelier in her mood 
Than in her mould that other, when she came 
From barren deeps to conquer all with love; 
And down the streaming crystal dropt; and she 150 



THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII i8l 

Far-fleeted by the purple Island-sides, 

Naked, a double light in air and wave, 

To meet her Graces, where they deck'd her out 

For worship without end ; nor end of mine, 

Stateliest, for thee ! but mute she glided forth, 155 

Nor glanced behind her, and I sank and slept, 

Fill'd thro' and thro' with Love, a happy sleep. 

Deep in the night I woke : she, near me, held 
A volume of the Poets of her land : 
There to herself, all in low tones, she read. 160 



Pale was the perfect face ; 
The bosom with long sighs labour'd ; and meek 210 

Seem'd the full lips, and mild the luminous eyes, 
And the voice trembled and the hand. She said 
Brokenly, that she knew it, she had fail'd 
In sweet humility ; had fail'd in all ; 

That all her labour was but as a block 215 

Left in the quarry ; but she still were loth, 
She still were loth to yield herself to one 
That wholly scorn'd to help their equal rights 
Against the sons of men, and barbarous laws. 
She pray'd me not to judge their cause from her 220 
That wrong' d it, sought far less for truth than power 
In knowledge : something wild within her breast, 
A greater than all knowledge, beat her down. 
And she had nursed me there from week to week : 
Much had she learnt in litde time. In part 225 

It was ill counsel had misled the girl 
To vex true hearts : yet was she but a girl — 
* Ah fool, and made myself a Queen of farce ! 



I82 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

When comes another such? never, I think, 
Till the Sun drop, dead, from the signs.' 

Her voice 230 
Choked, and her forehead sank upon her hands, 
And her great heart thro' all the faultful Past 
Went sorrowing in a pause I dared not break; 
Till notice of a change in the dark world 
Was hspt about the acacias, and a bird, 235 

That early woke to feed her Uttle ones. 
Sent from a dewy breast a cry for light : 
She moved, and at her feet the volume fell. 

' Blame not thyself too much,' I said, ' nor blame 
Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws ; 240 

These were the rough ways of the world till now. 
Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know 
The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink 
Together, dwarf 'd or godUke, bond or free: 
For she that out of Lethe scales with man 245 

The shining steps of Nature, shares with man 
His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal, 
Stays all the fair young planet in her hands — 
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable. 
How shall men grow? but work no more alone ! 250 

Our place is much : as far as in us lies 
We two will serve them both in aiding her — 
Will clear away the parasitic forms 
That seem to keep her up but drag her down — 
Will leave her space to burgeon out of all 255 

Within her — let her make herself her own 
To give or keep, to live and learn and be 
All that not harms distinctive womanhood. 
For woman is not undevelopt man. 



THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII 183 

But diverse : could we make her as the man, 260 

Sweet Love were slain : his dearest bond is this, 

Not like to like, but like in difference. 

Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; 

The man be more of woman, she of man ; 

He gain in sweetness and in moral height, 265 

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, 

Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind ; 

Till at the last she set herself to man, 

Like perfect music unto noble words ; 270 

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 

Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers, 

Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 

Self-reverent each and reverencing each, 

Distinct in individualities, 275 

But like each other ev'n as those who love. 

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men : 

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm : 

Then springs the crowning race of humankind. 

May these things be ! ' 

Sighing she spoke, ' I fear 2S0 
They will not.' 

* Dear, but let us type them now 
In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest 
Of equal ; seeing either sex alone 
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies 
Nor equal, nor unequal : each fulfils 285 

Defect in each, and always thought in thought, 
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow. 
The single pure and perfect animal. 
The two-cell'd heart beating, with one full stroke. 
Life.' 



l84 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

And again sighing she spoke : ' A dream 290 

That once was mine! what woman taught you this?' 

' Alone,' I said, ' from earher than I know, 
Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world, 
I loved the woman : he, that doth not, lives 
A drowning life, besotted in sweet self, 295 

Or pines in sad experience worse than death, 
Or keeps his wing'd affections cHpt with crime : 
Yet was there one thro' whom I loved her, one 
Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 300 

No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt 
In Angel instincts, breathing. Paradise, 
Interpreter between the Gods and men. 
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet 
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere 305 

Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce 
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved, 
And girdled her with music. Happy he 
With such a mother ! faith in womankind 
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 310 

Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall 
He shall not blind his soul with clay.' 

'But I,' 
Said Ida, tremulously, ' so all unlike — 
It seems you love to 'cheat yourself with words : 
This mother is your model. I have heard 315 

Of your strange doubts : they well might be : I seem 
A mockery to my own self. Never, Prince ; 
You cannot love me.' 

' Nay but thee,' I said, 
' From yearlong poring on thy pictured eyes, 



THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII 185 

Ere seen I loved, and loved thee seen, and saw 320 

Thee woman thro' the crust of iron moods 

That mask'd thee from men's reverence up, and forced 

Sweet love on pranks of saucy boyhood : now, 

Giv'n back to life, to life indeed, thro' thee, 

Indeed I love : the new day comes, the light 325 

Dearer for night, as dearer thou for faults 

Lived over : lift thine eyes ; my doubts are dead, 

My haunting sense of hollow shows : the change. 

This truthful change in thee has kill'd it. Dear, 

Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine, 330 

Like yonder morning on the blind half-world ; 

Approach and fear not ; breathe upon my brows ; 

In that fine air I tremble, all the past 

Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this 

Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come 335 

Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels 

Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. Forgive me, 

I waste my heart in signs : let be. My bride, 

My wife, my life. O we will walk this world, 

Yoked in all exercise of noble end, 340 

And so thro' those dark gates across the wild 

That no man knows. Indeed I love thee : come, 

Yield thyself up : my hopes and thine are one : 

Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself; 

Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.' 345 



l86 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 



GUINEVERE 

Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat 
There in the holy house at Ahiiesbury 
Weeping, none with her save a httle maid, 
A novice : one low light betwixt them burn'd 
Blurr'd by the creeping mist, for all abroad. 
Beneath a moon unseen albeit at full, 
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face. 
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still. 

For hither had she fled, her cause of flight 
Sir Modred ; he that like a subtle beast 
Lay couchant with his eyes upon the throne, 
Ready to spring, waiting a chance : for this 
He chill'd the popular praises of the "King 
With silent smiles of slow disparagement ; 
And tamper'd with the Lords of the White Horse, 
Heathen, the brood by Hengist left ; and sought 
To make disruption in the Table Round 
Of Arthur, and to splinter it into feuds 
Serving his traitorous end ; and all his aims 
Were sharpen'd by strong hate for Lancelot. 

For thus it chanced one morn when all the court. 
Green-suited, but with plumes that mock'd the may, 
Had been, their wont, a-maying and return'd, 
That Modred still in green, all ear and eye, 
Climb'd to the high top of the garden-wall 
To spy some secret scandal if he might, 
And saw the Queen who sat betwixt her best 
Enid, and lissome Vivien, of her court 
The wiliest and the worst ; and more than this 



GUINEVERE 187 

He saw not, for Sir Lancelot passing by 30 

Spied where he couch'd, and as the gardener's hand 

Picks from the colewort a green caterpillar, 

So from the high wall and the flowering grove 

Of grasses Lancelot pluck'd him by the heel, 

And cast him as a worm upon the way ; 35 

But when he knew the Prince tho' marr'd with dust, 

He, reverencing king's blood in a bad man, 

Made such excuses as he might, and these 

Full knightly without scorn ; for in those days 

No knight of Arthur's noblest dealt in scorn ; 40 

But, if a man were halt or hunch'd, in him 

By those whom God had made full-limb'd and tall, 

Scorn was allow'd as part of his defect, 

And he was answer'd softly by the King 

And all his Table. So Sir Lancelot holp 45 

To raise the Prince, who rising twice or thrice 

Full sharply smote his knees, and smiled, and went : 

But, ever after, the small violence done 

Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart. 

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long 50 

A little bitter pool about a stone 

On the bare coast. 

But when Sir Lancelot told 
This matter to the Queen, at first she laugh'd 
Lightly, to think of Modred's dusty fall. 
Then shudder'd, as the village wife who cries 55 

' I shudder, some one steps across my grave ; ' 
Then laugh'd again, but faintlier, for indeed 
She half-foresaw that he, the subtle beast, 
Would track her guilt until he found, and hers 
Would be for evermore a name of scorn. 60 

Henceforward rarely could she front in hall. 



l88 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Or elsewhere, Modred's narrow foxy face, 

Heart-hiding smile, and gray persistent eye : 

Henceforward too, the Powers that tend the soul, 

To help it from the death that cannot die, 65 

And save it even in extremes, began 

To vex and plague her. Many a time for hours, 

Beside the placid breathings of the King, 

In the dead night, grim faces came and went 

Before her, or a vague spiritual fear — 70 

Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors, 

Heard by the watcher in a haunted house. 

That keeps the rust of murder on the walls — 

Held her awake : or if she slept, she dream'd 

An awful dream ; for then she seem'd to stand 75 

On some vast plain before a setting sun. 

And from the sun there swiftly made at her 

A ghastly something, and its shadow flew 

Before it, till it touch'd her, and she turn'd — 

When lo ! her own, that broadening from her feet, 80 

And blackening, swallow'd all the land, and in it 

Far cities burnt, and with a cry she woke. 

And all this trouble did not pass but grew ; 

Till ev'n the clear face of the guileless King, 

And trustful courtesies of household life, 85 

Became her bane ; and at the last she said, 

'O Lancelot, get thee hence to thine own land, 

For if thou tarry we shall meet again. 

And if we meet again, some evil chance 

Will make the smouldering scandal break and blaze 90 

Before the people, and our lord the King.' 

And Lancelot ever promised, but remain'd, 

And still they met and met. Again she said, 

' O Lancelot, if thou love me get thee hence.' 



GUINEVERE 189 

And then they were agreed upon a night 95 

(When the good King should not be there) to meet 

And part for ever. Vivien, lurking, heard. 

She told Sir Modred. Passion-pale they met 

And greeted. Hands in hands, and eye to eye, 

Low on the border of her couch they sat 100 

Stammering and staring. It was their last hour, 

A madness of farewells. And Modred brought 

His creatures to the basement of the tower 

For testimony ; and crying with full voice 

* Traitor, come out, ye are trapt at last,' aroused 105 
Lancelot, who rushing outward lionlike 

Leapt on him, and hurl'd him headlong, and he fell 
Stunn'd, and his creatures took and bare him off, 
And all was still : then she, ' The end is come. 
And I am shamed for ever;' and he said, no 

* Mine be the shame ; mine was the sin : but rise, 
And fly to my strong castle overseas : 

There will I hide thee, till my life shall end, 

There hold thee with my life against the world.' 

She answer'd, 'Lancelot, wilt thou hold me so? 115 

Nay, friend, for we have taken our farewells. 

Would God that thou couldst hide me from myself! 

Mine is the shame, for I was wife, and thou 

Unwedded : yet rise now, and let us fly. 

For I will draw me into sanctuary, 120 

And bide my doom.' So Lancelot got her horse. 

Set her thereon, and mounted on his own, 

And then they rode to the divided way. 

There kiss'd, and parted weeping : for he past. 

Love-loyal to the least wish of the Queen, 125 

Back to his land ; but she to Almesbury 

Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald. 



igo SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS . 

And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald 

Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan : 

And in herself she moan'd, 'Too late, too late!' 130 

Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, 

A blot in heaven, the Raven, flying high, 

Croak'd, and she thought, ' He spies a field of death ; 

For now the Heathen of the Northern Sea, 

Lured by the crimes and frailties of the court, 135 

Begin to slay the folk, and spoil the land.' 

And when she came to Almesbury she spake 
There to the nuns, and said, 'Mine enemies 
Pursue me, but, O peaceful Sisterhood, 
Receive, and yield me sanctuary, nor ask 140 

Her name to whom ye yield it, till her time 
To tell you : ' and her beauty, grace, and power, 
Wrought as a charm upon them, and they spared 
To ask it. 

So the stately Queen abode 
For many a week, unknown, among the nuns ; 145 

Nor with them mix'd, nor told her name, nor sought, 
Wrapt in her grief, for housel or for shrift. 
But communed only with the Htde maid. 
Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness 
Which often lured her from herself; but now, 150 

This night, a rumour wildly blown about 
Came, that Sir Modred had usurp'd the realm. 
And leagued him with the heathen, while the King 
Was waging war on Lancelot : then she thought, 
'With what a hate the people and the King 155 

Must hate me,' and bow'd down upon her hands 
Silent, until the Httle maid, who brook'd 
No silence, brake it, uttering, ' Late ! so late ! 



GUINEVERE 191 

What hour, I wonder, now?' and when she drew 

No answer, by and by began to hum 160 

An air the nuns had taught her, < Late, so late ! ' 

Which when she heard, the Queen look'd up, and said, 

' O maiden, if indeed ye Ust to sing. 

Sing, and unbind my heart that I may weep.' 

W^hereat full willingly sang the little maid. 165 

* Late, late, so late ! and dark the night and chill ! 
Late, late, so late ! but we can enter still. 

Too late, too late ! ye cannot enter now. 

' No light had we : for that we do repent ; 
And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. 170 

Too late, too late ! ye cannot enter now. 

* No light : so late ! and dark and chill the night ! 
O let us in, that we may find the light ! 

Too late, too late : ye cannot enter now. 

'Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? 175 
O let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet ! 
No, no, too late ! ye cannot enter now.' 

So sang the novice, while full passionately. 
Her head upon her hands, remembering 
Her thought when first she came, wept the sad Queen. 180 
Then said the little novice prattling to her, 

' O pray you, noble lady, weep no more ; 
But let my words, the words of one so small. 
Who knowing nothing knows but to obey. 
And if I do not there is penance given — 185 

Comfort your sorrows ; for they do not flow 



192 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

From evil done ; right sure am I of that, 

Who see your tender grace and stateliness. 

But weigh your sorrows with our lord the King's, 

And weighing find them less; for gone is he 190 

To wage grim war against Sir Lancelot there, 

Round that strong castle where he holds the Queen; 

And Modred whom he left in charge of all, 

The traitor — Ah sweet lady, the King's grief 

For his own self, and his own Queen, and realm, 195 

Must needs be thrice as great as any of ours. 

For me, I thank the saints, I am not great. 

For if there ever come a grief to me 

I cry my cry in silence, and have done. 

None knows it, and my tears have brought me good : 200 

But even were the griefs of httle ones 

As great as those of great ones, yet this grief 

Is added to the griefs the great must bear, 

That howsoever much they may desire 

Silence, they cannot weep behind a cloud : 205 

As even here they talk at Almesbury 

About the good King and his wicked Qucfin, 

And were I such a King with such a Queen, 

Well might I wish to veil her wickedness, 

But were I such a King, it could not be.' 210 

Then to her own sad heart mutter'd the Queen, 
'Will the child kill me with her innocent talk?' 
But openly she answer'd, ' Must not I, 
If this false traitor have displaced his lord. 
Grieve with the common grief of all the realm?' 215 

'Yea,' said the maid, 'this is all woman's grief. 
That she is woman, whose disloyal life 



GUINEVERE 193 

Hath wrought confusion in the Table Round 

Which good King Arthur founded, years ago, 

With signs and miracles and wonders, there 220 

At Camelot, ere the coming of the Queen.' 

Then thought the Queen within herself again, 

* Will the child kill me with her foolish prate ? ' 
But openly she spake and said to her, 

* O Httle maid, shut in by nunnery walls, 225 
What canst thou know of Kings and Tables Round, 

Or what of signs and wonders, but the signs 
And simple miracles of thy nunnery?' 

To whom the little novice garrulously, 
' Yea, but I know : the land was full of signs 230 

And wonders ere the coming of the Queen. 
So said my father, and himself was knight 
Of the great Table — at the founding of it ; 
And rode thereto from Lyonesse, and he said 
That as he rode, an hour or maybe twain 235 

After the sunset, down the coast, he heard 
Strange music, and he paused, and turning — there, 
All down the lonely coast of Lyonesse, 
Each with a beacon-star upon his head. 
And with a wild sea-light about his feet, 240 

He saw them — headland after headland flame 
Far on into the rich heart of the west : 
And in the light the white mermaiden swam, 
And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, 
And sent a deep sea-voice thro' all the land, 245 

To which the little elves of chasm and cleft 
Made answer, sounding like a distant horn. 
So said my father — yea, and furthermore. 



194 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Next morning, while he passed the dim-Ht woods, 
Himself beheld three spirits mad with joy 
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower, 
That shook beneath them, as the thistle shakes 
When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed : 
And still at evenings on before his horse 
The flickering fairy-circle wheel'd and broke 
Flying, and Hnk'd again, and wheel'd and broke 
Flying, for all the land was full of life. 
And when at last he came to Camelot, 
A wreath of airy dancers hand-in-hand 
Swung round the lighted lantern of the hall; 
And in the hall itself was such a feast 
As never man had dream'd ; for every knight 
Had whatsoever meat he long'd for served 
By hands unseen ; and even as he said 
Down in the cellars merry bloated things 
Shoulder'd the spigot, straddling on the butts 
While the wine ran : so glad were spirits and men 
Before the coming of the sinful Queen.' 

Then spake the Queen and somewhat bitterly, 
'Were they so glad? ill prophets were they all. 
Spirits and men : could none of them foresee, 
Not even thy wise father with his signs 
And wonders, what has fall'n upon the realm?' 

To whom the novice garrulously again, 
*Yea, one, a bard; of whom my father said, 
Full many a noble war-song had he sung, 
Ev'n in the presence of an enemy's fleet, 
Between the steep cliff and the coming wave; 
And many a mystic lay of life and death 



GUINEVERE 195 

Had chanted on the smoky mountain-tops, 280 

When round him bent the spirits of the hills 

With all their dewy hair blown back like flame : 

So said my father — and that night the bard 

Sang Arthur's glorious wars, and sang the King 

As wellnigh more than man, and rail'd at those 285 

Who call'd him the false son of Gorlois : 

For there was no man knew from whence he came ; 

But after tempest, when the long wave broke 

All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos, 

There came a day as still as heaven, and then 290 

They found a naked child upon the sands 

Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea ; 

And that was Arthur ; and they foster'd him 

Till he by miracle was approven King : 

And that his grave should be a mystery 295 

From all men, like his birth ; and could he find • 

A woman in her womanhood as great 

As he was in his manhood, then, he sang, 

The twain together well might change the world. 

But even in the middle of his song 3°° 

He falter 'd, and his hand fell from the harp, 

And pale he turn'd, and reel'd, and would have fall'n. 

But that they stay'd him up ; nor would he tell 

His vision ; but what doubt that he foresaw 

This evil work of Lancelot and the Queen ? ' 305 

Then thought the Queen, * Lo ! they have set her on. 
Our simple-seeming Abbess and her nuns. 
To play upon me,' and bow'd her head nor spake. 
Whereat the novice crying, with clasp'd hands, 
Shame on her own garrulity garrulously, 310 

Said the good nuns would check her gadding tongue 



196 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Full often, 'and, sweet lady, if I seem 

To vex an ear too sad to listen to me, 

Unmannerly, with prattling and the tales 

Which my good father told me, check me too 315 

Nor let me shame my father's memory, one 

Of noblest manners, tho' himself would say 

Sir Lancelot had the noblest ; and he died, 

Kill'd in a tilt, come next, five summers back. 

And left me ; but of others who remain, 320 

And of the two first-famed for courtesy — 

And pray you check me if I ask amiss — 

But pray you, which had noblest, while you moved 

Among them, Lancelot or our lord the King?' 

Then the pale Queen look'd up and answer'd her, 325 
'Sir Lancelot, as became a noble knight, 
Was gracious to all ladies, and the same 
In open battle or the tilting-field 
Forbore his own advantage, and the King 
In open battle or the tilting-field 33° 

Forbore his own advantage, and these two 
Were the most nobly-manner'd men of all ; 
For manners are not idle, but the fruit 
Of loyal nature, and of noble mind.' 

'Yea,' said the maid, 'be manners such fair fruit? 335 
Then Lancelot's needs must be a thousand-fold 
Less noble, being, as all rumour runs, 
The most disloyal friend in all the world.' 

To which a mournful answer made the Queen : 
* O closed about by narrowing nunnery-walls, 340 

What knowest thou of the world, and all its lights 



GUINEVERE I97 

And shadows, all the wealth and all the woe? 

If ever Lancelot, that most noble knight. 

Were for one hour less noble than himself. 

Pray for him that he scape the doom of fire, 345 

And weep for her who drew him to his doom.' 

* Yea,' said the little novice, * I pray for both ; 
But I should all as soon believe that his, 
Sir Lancelot's, were as noble as the King's, 
As I could think, sweet lady, yours would be 350 

Such as they are, were you the sinful Queen.' 

So she, like many another babbler, hurt 
Whom she would soothe, and harm'd where she would heal ; 
For here a sudden flush of wrathful heat 
Fired all the pale face of the Queen, who cried, 355 

* Such as thou art be never maiden more 
For ever ! thou their tool, set on to plague 
And play upon, and harry me, petty spy 
And traitress.' When that storm of anger brake 
From Guinevere, aghast the maiden rose, 360 

White as her veil, and stood before the Queen 
As tremulously as foam upon the beach 
Stands in a wind, ready to break and fly. 
And when the Queen had added * Get thee hence,' 
Fled frighted. Then that other left alone 365 

Sigh'd, and began to gather heart again. 
Saying in herself, ' The simple, fearful child 
Meant nothing, but my own too-fearful guilt, 
Simpler than any child, betrays itself. 

But help me, heaven, for surely I repent. 370 

For what is true repentance but in thought — 
Not ev'n in inmost thought to think again 



SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

The sins that made the past so pleasant to us : 
And I have sworn never to see him more, 
To see him more.' 

And ev'n in saying this, 375 

Her memory from old habit of the mind 
Went slipping back upon the golden days 
In which she saw him first, when Lancelot came, 
Reputed the best knight and goodliest man. 
Ambassador, to lead her to his lord 380 

Arthur, and led her forth, and far ahead 
Of his and her retinue moving, they, 
Rapt in sweet talk or lively, all on love 
And sport and tilts and pleasure, (for the time 
Was maytime, and as yet no sin was dream'd,) 385 

Rode under groves that look'd a paradise 
Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth 
That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth, 
And on from hill to hill, and every day 
Beheld at noon in some delicious dale 390 

The silk pavilions of King Arthur raised 
For brief repast or afternoon repose 
By couriers gone before ; and on again. 
Till yet once more ere set of sun they saw 
The Dragon of the great Pendragonship, 395 

That crown'd the state pavilion of the King, 
Blaze by the rushing brook or silent well. 

But when the Queen immersed in such a trance, 
And moving thro' the past unconsciously. 
Came to that point where first she saw the King 400 

Ride toward her from the city, sigh'd to find 
Her journey done, glanced at him, thought him cold. 
High, self-contain'd, and passionless, not like him, 



GUINEVERE 199 

' Not like my Lancelot ' — while she brooded thus 

And grew half-guilty in her thoughts again, 405 

There rode an armed warrior to the doors. 

A murmuring whisper thro' the nunnery ran, 

Then on a sudden a cry, ' The King.' She sat 

Stiff-stricken, listening ; but when armed feet 

Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors 410 

Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell, 

And grovell'd with her face against the floor : 

There with her milkwhite arms and shadowy hair 

She made her face a darkness from the King : 

And in the darkness heard his armed feet 415 

Pause by her ; then came silence, then a voice, 

Monotonous and hollow like a Ghost's 

Denouncing judgment, but tho' changed, the King's : 

* Liest thou here so low, the child of one 
I honour'd, happy, dead before thy shame? 420 

Well is it that no child is born of thee. 
The children born of thee are sword and fire, 
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws, 
The craft of kindred and the Godless hosts 
Of heathen swarming o'er the Northern Sea ; 425 

Whom I, while yet Sir Lancelot, my right arm. 
The mightiest of my knights, abode with me. 
Have everywhere about this land of Christ 
In twelve great battles ruining overthrown. 
And knowest thou now from whence I come — from him, 43° 
From waging bitter war with him : and he, 
That did not shun to smite me in worse way. 
Had yet that grace of courtesy in him left, 
He spared to lift his hand against the King 
Who made him knight : but many a knight was slain ; 435 



200 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

And many more, and all his kith and kin 

Clave to him, and abode in his own land. 

And many more when Modred raised revolt, 

Forgetful of their troth and fealty, clave 

To Modred, and a remnant stays with me. 44° 

And of this remnant will I leave a part, 

True men who love me still, for whom I live, 

To guard thee in the wild hour coming on, 

Lest but a hair of this low head be harm'd. 

Fear not : thou shalt be guarded till my death. 445 

Howbeit I know, if ancient prophecies 

Have err'd not, that I march to meet my doom. 

Thou hast not made my life so sweet to me, 

That I the King should greatly care to live; 

For thou hast spoilt the purpose of my hfe. 45° 

Bear with me for the last time while I show, 

Ev'n for thy sake, the sin which thou hast sinn'd. 

For when the Roman left us, and their law 

Relax'd its hold upon us, and the ways 

Were fill'd with rapine, here and there a deed 455 

Of prowess done redress'd a random wrong. 

But I was first of all the kings who drew 

The Knighthood-errant of this realm and all 

The realms together under me, their Head, 

In that fair Order of my Table Round, 460 

A glorious company, the flower of men, 

To serve as model for the mighty world. 

And be the fair beginning of a time. 

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear 

To reverence the King, as if he were 465 

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, 

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, 



GUINEVERE 20I 

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 

To honour his own word as if his God's, 470 

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 

To love one maiden only, cleave to her, 

And worship her by years of noble deeds. 

Until they won her ; for indeed I knew 

Of no more subtle master under heaven 475 

Than is the maiden passion for a maid. 

Not only to keep down the base in man. 

But teach high thought, and amiable words 

And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 

And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 480 

And all this throve before I wedded thee, 

Believing, " lo mine helpmate, one to feel 

My purpose and rejoicing in my joy." 

Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot ; 

Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt ; 485 

Then others, following these my mightiest knights. 

And drawing foul ensample from fair names, 

Sinn'd also, till the loathsome opposite 

Of all my heart had destined did obtain. 

And all thro' thee ! so that this Hfe of mine 490 

I guard as God's high gift from scathe and wrong, 

Not greatly care to lose ; but rather think 

How sad it were for Arthur, should he live, 

To sit once more within his lonely hall. 

And miss the wonted number of my knights, 495 

And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds 

As in the golden days before thy sin. 

For which of us, who might be left, could speak 

Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee? 

And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk 500 

Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, 



202 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

And I should evermore be vext with thee 

In hanging robe or vacant ornament, 

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair. 

For think not, tho' thou wouldst not love thy lord, 

Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee. 

I am not made of so slight elements. 

Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame. 

I hold that man the worst of public foes 

Who either for his own or children's sake, 

To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife 

Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house : 

For being thro' his cowardice allow'd 

Her station, taken everywhere for pure, 

She Hke a new disease, unknown to men. 

Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, 

Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps 

The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse 

With devil's leaps, and poisons half the young. 

Worst of the worst were that man he that reigns ! 

Better the King's waste hearth and aching heart 

Than thou reseated in thy place of light. 

The mockery of my people, and their bane.' 

He paused, and in the pause she crept an inch 
Nearer, and laid her hands about his feet. 
Far off a soUtary trumpet blew. 
Then waiting by the doors the warhorse neigh'd 
As at a friend's voice, and he spake again : 

*Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes, 
I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, 
I, whose vast pity almost makes me die 
To see thee, laying there thy golden head. 



^i 



GUINEVERE 203 

My pride in happier summers, at my feet. 

The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law, 

The doom of treason and the flaming death, 535 

(When first I learnt thee hidden here), is past. 

The pang — which while I weigh'd thy heart with one 

Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee, 

Made my tears burn — is also past — in part. 

And all is past, the sin is sinn'd, and I, 540 

Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 

Forgives : do thou for thine own soul the rest. 

But how to take last leave of all I loved? 

golden hair, with which I used to play 

Not knowing ! O imperial-moulded form, 545 

And beauty such as never woman wore, 
Until it came a kingdom's curse with thee — 

1 cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine, 

But Lancelot's : nay, they never were the King's. 

1 cannot take thy hand ; that too is flesh, 550 

And in the flesh thou hast sinn'd ; and mine own flesh, 

Here looking down on thine polluted, cries 

*' I loathe thee:" yet not less, O Guinevere, 

For I was ever virgin save for thee, 

My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life 555 

So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 

Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 

Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul. 

And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 

Hereafter in that world where all are pure 560 

We two may meet before high God, and thou 

Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 

I am thine husband — not a smaller soul, 

Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, 

I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence. 565 



204 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow : 
They summon me their King to lead mine hosts 
Far down to that great battle in the west, 
Where I must strike against the man they call 
My sister's son — no kin of mine, who leagues 
With Lords of the White Horse, heathen, and knights, 
Traitors — and strike him dead, and meet myself 
Death, or I know not what mysterious doom. 
And thou remaining here wilt learn the event ; 
But hither shall I never come again, 
Never He by thy side ; see thee no more — 
Farewell ! ' 

And while she grovell'd at his feet. 
She felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck. 
And in the darkness o'er her fallen head. 
Perceived the waving of his hands that blest. 

Then, listening till those armed steps were gone, 
Rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found 
The casement : ' peradventure,' so she thought, 
' If I might see his face, and not be seen.' 
And lo, he sat on horseback at the door ! 
And near him the sad nuns with each a light 
Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen, 
To guard and foster her for evermore. 
And while he spake to these his helm was lower 'd, 
To which for crest the golden dragon clung 
Of Britain ; so she did not see the face. 
Which then was as an angel's, but she saw, 
Wet with the mists and smitten by the Hghts, 
The Dragon of the great Pendragonship 
Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire. 
And even then he turn'd ; and more and more 



GUINEVERE 205 

The moony vapour rolling round the King, 

Who seem'd the phantom of a Giant in it, 

Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray 

And grayer, till himself became as mist 600 

Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom. 

Then she stretch'd out her arms and cried aloud 
' O Arthur ! ' there her voice brake suddenly, 
Then — as a stream that spouting from a cliff 
Fails in mid-air, but gathering at the base 605 

Re-makes itself, and flashes down the vale — 
Went on in passionate utterance : 

' Gone — my lord ! 
Gone thro' my sin to slay and to be slain ! 
And he forgave me, and I could not speak. 
Farewell? I should have answer'd his farewell. 610 

His mercy choked me. Gone, my lord the King, 
My own true lord ! how dare I call him mine? 
The shadow of another cleaves to me. 
And makes me one pollution : he, the King, 
Call'd me polluted: shall I kill myself? 615 

What help in that? I cannot kill my sin. 
If soul be soul ; nor can I kill my shame ; 
No, nor by living can I live it down. 
The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months, 
The months will add themselves and make the years, 620 
The years will roll into the centuries. 
And mine will ever be a name of scorn. 
I must not dwell on that defeat of fame. 
Let the world be ; that is but of the world. 
What else? what hope? I think there was a hope, 625 
Except he mock'd me when he spake of hope ; 
His hope he call'd it ; but he never mocks. 



206 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

For mockery is the fume of little hearts. 

And blessed be the King, who hath forgiven 

My wickedness to him, and left me hope 630 

That in mine own heart I can live down sin 

And be his mate hereafter in the heavens 

Before high God. Ah, great and gentle lord, 

Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint 

Among his warring senses, to thy knights — 635 

To whom my false voluptuous pride, that took 

Full easily all impressions from below, 

Would not look up, or half-despised the height 

To which I would not or I could not climb — 

I thought I could not breathe in that fine air 640 

That pure severity of perfect light — 

I yearn'd for warmth and colour which I found 

In Lancelot — now I see thee what thou art. 

Thou art the highest and most human too, 

Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none 645 

Will tell the King I love him tho' so late? 

Now — ere he goes to the great Battle ? none : 

Myself must tell him in that purer life. 

But now it were too daring. Ah my God, 

What might I not have made of thy fair world, 650 

Had I but loved thy highest creature here? 

It was my duty to have loved the highest : 

It surely was my profit had I known : 

It would have been my pleasure had I seen. 

We needs must love the highest when we see it, 655 

Not Lancelot, nor another.' 

Here her hand 
Grasp'd, made her vail her eyes : she look'd and saw 
The novice, weeping, suppliant, and said to her, 
'Yea, Httle maid, for am /not forgiven?' 
Then glancing up beheld the holy nuns 660 



GUINEVERE 207 

All round her, weeping ; and her heart was loosed 
Within her, and she wept with these and said, 

' Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke 
The vast design and purpose of the King. 

shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls, 665 
Meek maidens, from the voices crying "shame." 

1 must not scorn myself: he loves me still. 
Let no one dream but that he loves me still. 
So let me, if you do not shudder at me. 

Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you ; 670 

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you, 

Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts ; 

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys. 

But not rejoicing ; mingle with your rites ; 

Pray and be pray'd for; lie before your shrines; 675 

Do each low office of your holy house ; 

Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole 

To poor sick people, richer in His eyes 

Who ransom'd us, and haler too than I ; 

And treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own ; 680 

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer 

The sombre close of that voluptuous day, 

Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.' 

She said : they took her to themselves ; and she 
Still hoping, fearing, * is it yet too late?' 685 

Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died. 
Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life, 
And for the power of ministration in her. 
And likewise for the high rank she had borne, 
Was chosen Abbess, there, an Abbess, lived 690 

For three brief years, and there, an Abbess, past 
To where beyond these voices there is peace. 



208 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

MORTE D'ARTHUR 

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd 

Among the mountains by the winter sea; 

Until King Arthur's table, man by man, 

Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord, 

King Arthur : then, because his wound was deep, 5 

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, 

Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, 

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 

A broken chancel with a broken cross. 

That stood on a dark strait of barren land. 10 

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one 

Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere : 
'The sequel of to-day unsolders all 

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights 15 

Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep 
They sleep — the men I loved. I think that we 
Shall never more, at any future time, 
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, 
Walking about the gardens and the halls 20 

Of Camelot, as in the days that were. 
I perish by this people which I made, — 
Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again 
To rule once more — but let what will be, be, 
I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm 25 

That without help I cannot last till morn. 
Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, 
Which was my pride : for thou rememberest how 
In those old days, one summer noon, an arm 
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, 30 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 209 

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, 

Holding the sword — and how I row'd across 

And took it, and have worn it, like a king : 

And, wheresoever I am sung or told 

In aftertime, this also shall be known : 35 

But now delay not : take Excalibur, 

And fling him far into the middle mere : 

Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.' 

To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere : 
* It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, 40 

Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm. 
A little thing may harm a wounded man. 
Yet I thy hest will all perform at full. 
Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.' 

So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept 45 

And in the moon athwart, the place of tombs, 
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men. 
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang 
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down 
By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock, 50 

Came on the shining levels of the lake. 

There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, 
And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, 
Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth 
And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt : 55 

For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, 
Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work 
Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long 
That both his eyes were dazzled, as he stood, 
This way and that dividing the swift mind, 60 



2IO SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

In act to throw : but at the last it seem'd 

Better to leave Excalibur conceal' d 

There in the many-knotted waterflags, 

That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. 

So strode he back slow to the wounded King. 65 

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere : 
' Hast thou perform'd my mission which I gave ? 
What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' 

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere : 
'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, 7^5 

And the wild water lapping on the crag.' 

To whom repHed King Arthur, faint and pale : 
'Thou hast betray'd thy nature and thy name, 
Not rendering true answer, as beseem'd 
Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight : 75 

For surer sign had follow'd, either hand, 
Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. 
This is a shameful thing for men to He. 
Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again 
As thou art Hef and dear, and do the thing 80 

I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.' 

Then went Sir Bedivere the second time 
Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, 
Counting the dewy pebbles, fix'd in thought; 
But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, 85 

How curiously and strangely chased, he smote 
His palms together, and he cried aloud, 

'And if indeed I cast the brand away, 
Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 211 

Should thus be lost for ever from the earth, 90 

Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. 

What good should follow this, if this were done? 

What harm, undone? deep harm to disobey, 

Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. 

Were it well to obey, then, if a king demand 95 

An act unprofitable, against himself? 

The King is sick, and knows not what he does. 

What record, or what relic of my lord 

Should be to aftertime, but empty breath 

And rumours of a doubt? but were this kept, 100 

Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, 

Some one might show it at a joust of arms. 

Saying, " King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, 

Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. 

Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps 105 

Upon the hidden bases of the hills." 

So might some old man speak in the aftertime 

To all the people, winning reverence. 

But now much honour and much fame were lost.' 

So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, no 

And hid Excalibur the second time. 
And so strode back slow to the wounded King. 

Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily : 
'What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' 

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere : 115 

' I heard the water lapping on the crag, 
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.' 

To whom repHed King iVrthur, much in wrath : 
* Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, 



212 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Unknightly, traitor-hearted ! Woe is me ! 120 

Authority forgets a dying king, 

Laid widow'd of the power in his eye 

That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, 

For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, 

In whom should meet the offices of all, 125 

Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt ; 

Either from lust of gold, or like a girl 

Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. 

Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice. 

And the third time may prosper, get thee hence : 130 

But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, 

I will arise and slay thee with my hands.' 

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran. 
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged 
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword, 135 

And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand 
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, 
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, 
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, 
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 140 

By night, with noises of the northern sea. 
So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur : 
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. 
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him 145 

Three times, and drew him under in the mere. 
And lightly went the other to the King. 

Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath : 
' Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. 
Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?' 150 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 213 

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere : 
'Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems 
Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, 
Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till 1 die, 
Not tho' I live three lives of mortal men, 155 

So great a miracle as yonder hilt. 
Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him ; 
But when I look'd again, behold an arm. 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, 
That caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him 160 

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.' 

And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: 
' My end draws nigh ; 't is time that I were gone. 
Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, 
And bear me to the margin ; yet I fear 165 

My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.' 

So saying, from the pavement he half rose, 
Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm. 
And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes 
As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere 170 

Remorsefully regarded thro' his tears, 
And would have spoken, but he found not words ; 
Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee. 
O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, 
And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. 175 

But, as he walk'd. King Arthur panted hard. 
Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed 
When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, 
Muttering and murmuring at his ear, ' Quick, quick ! 
I fear it is too late, and I shall die.' 180 



214 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, 

Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, 

Larger than human on the frozen hills. 

He heard the deep behind him, and a cry 

Before. His own thought drove him, like a goad. 185 

Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves 

And barren chasms, and all to left and right 

The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based 

His feet on juts of sHppery crag that rang 

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels — 190 

And on a sudden, lo ! the level lake, 

And the long glories of the winter moon. 

Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge, 
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, 
Beneath them ; and descending they were ware 195 

That all the decks were dense with stately forms 
Black-stoled, black-hooded, Hke a dreapi — by these 
Three Queens with crowns of gold — and from them rose 
A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, 
And, as it were one voice, an agony 200 

Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills 
All night in a waste land, where no one comes, 
Or hath come, since the making of the world. 

Then murmur'd Arthur, * Place me in the barge,' 
And to the barge they came. There those three Queens 205 
Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. 
But she, that rose the tallest of them all 
And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, 
And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, 
And call'd him by his name, complaining loud, 210 

And dropping bitter tears against his brow 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 21 5 

Striped with dark blood : for all his face was white 

And colourless, and like the wither'd moon 

Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; 

And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops 215 

Of onset ; and the light and lustrous curls — 

That made his forehead like a rising sun 

High from the dais-throne — were parch'd with dust ; 

Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, 

Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. 220 

So like a shatter'd column lay the King ; 

Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, 

From spur to plume a star of tournament, 

Shot thro' the lists at Camelot, and charged 

Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. 225 

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere, 
'Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? 
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? 
For now I see the true old times are dead, 
When every morning brought a noble chance, 230 

And every chance brought out a noble knight. 
Such times have been not since the light that led 
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. 
But now the whole round table is dissolved 
Which was an image of the mighty world ; 235 

And I, the last, go forth companionless, 
And the days darken round me, and the years. 
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.' 

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge : 
'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 240 

And God fulfils Himself in many ways. 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 



2l6 SELECTIONS FROM EPIC POEMS 

Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? 

I have hved my Hfe, and that which I have done 

May He within Himself make pure ! but thou, 245 

If thou shouldst never see my face again, 

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice 

Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 250 

That nourish a blind life within the brain. 

If, knowing God, they Hft not hands of prayer 

Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 

For so the whole round earth is every way 

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 255 

But now farewell. I am going a long way 

With these thou seest — if indeed I go — 

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) 

To the island-valley of Avilion ; 

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 260 

Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies 

Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns 

And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, 

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.' 

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail 265 

Moved from the brink, Hke some full-breasted swan 
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, 
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood 
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere 
Revolving many memories, till the hull 270 

Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, 
And on the mere the wailing died away. 



IV 

PERSONAL AND PHILOSOPHIC 
POEMS 

(1) OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

THE POET 

The poet in a golden clime was born, 

With golden stars above ; 
Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love. 

He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, 5 

He saw thro' his own soul. 
The marvel of the everlasting will, 
An open scroll, 

Before him lay : with echoing feet he threaded 

The secretest walks of fame : 10 

The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed 
And wdng'd with flame. 

Like Indian reeds blown from his silver tongue, 

And of so fierce a flight. 
From Calpe unto Caucasus they sung, 15 

Filling with light 

217 



2l8 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

And vagrant melodies the winds which bore 

Them earthward till they lit; 
Then, like the arrow-seeds of the field flower, 
The fruitful wit 

Cleaving, took root, and springing forth anew 

Where'er they fell, behold, 
Like to the mother plant in semblance, grew 
A flower all gold, 

And bravely furnish'd all abroad to fling 

The winged shafts of truth, 
To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring 
Of Hope and Youth. 

So many minds did gird their orbs with beams, 

Tho' one did fling the fire. 
Heaven flow'd upon the soul in many dreams 
Of high desire. 

Thus truth was multipHed on truth, the world 

Like one great garden show'd, 
And thro' the wreaths of floating dark upcurl'd, 
Rare sunrise flow'd. 

And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise 

Her beautiful bold brow, 
When rites and forms before his burning eyes 
Melted like snow. 

There was no blood upon her maiden robes 

Sunn'd by those orient skies ; 
But round about the circles of the globes 
Of her keen eyes 



THE POET'S SONG 219 

And in her raiment's hem was traced in flame 45 

Wisdom, a name to shake 
All evil dreams of power — a sacred name. 
And when she spake, 

Her words did gather thunder as they ran, 

And as the lightning to the thunder 50 

Which follows it, riving the spirit of man. 
Making earth wonder, 

So was their meaning to her words. No sword 

Of wrath her right arm whirl'd. 
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 55 

She shook the world. 



THE POET'S SONG 

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose, 

He pass'd by the to^vn and out of the street, 
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun. 

And waves of shadow went over the wheat, 
And he sat him down in a lonely place, 

And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, 

And the lark drop down at his feet. 

The swallow stopt as he hunted the fly, 

The snake shpt under a spray. 
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, 

And stared, with his foot on the prey, 



220 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

And the nightingale thought, ' I have sung many songs, 

But never a one so gay, 
For he sings of what the world will be 15 

When the years have died away.' 



TO 



WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM 

I SEND you here a sort of allegory, 

(For you will understand it) of a soul, 

A sinful soul possess'd of many gifts, 

A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, 

A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain, . 5 

That did love Beauty only (Beauty seen 

In all varieties of mould and mind). 

And Knowledge for its beauty ; or if Good, 

Good only for its beauty, seeing not 

That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters 10 

That dote upon each other, friends to man. 

Living together under the same roof, 

And never can be sunder'd without tears. 

And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be 

Shut out from Love, and on her threshold he, 15 

HowHng in outer darkness. Not for this 

Was common clay ta'en from the common earth 

Moulded by God, and temper'd with the tears 

Of angels to the perfect shape of man. 



THE TALACE OF ART 221 

THE PALACE OF ART 

I Buii.T my soul a lordly pleasure-house, 

Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. 
I said, * O Soul, make merry and carouse, 
Dear soul, for all is well.' 

A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish'd brass 5 

I chose. The ranged ramparts bright 
From level meadow-bases of deep grass 
Suddenly scaled the light. 

Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf 

The rock rose clear, or winding stair. 10 

My soul would live alone unto herself 
In her high palace there. 

And 'While the world runs round and round,' I said, 

' Reign thou apart, a quiet king, 
Still as, while Saturn whirls, his stedfast shade 15 

Sleeps on his luminous ring.' 

To which my soul made answer readily : 

' Trust me, in bliss I shall abide 
In this great mansion, that is built for me, 

So royal-rich and wide.' 20 

***** ^ 

***** 

Four courts I made, East, West and South and North, 

In each a squared lawn, wherefrom 
The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth 
A flood of fountain-foam. 



222 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

And round the cool green courts there ran a row 25 

Of cloisters, branch'd Hke mighty woods, 
Echoing all night to that sonorous flow 
Of spouted fountain-floods. 

And round the roofs a gilded gallery 

That lent broad verge to distant lands, 30 

Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky 
Dipt down to sea and sands. 

From those four jets four currents in one swell 

Across the mountain stream'd below 
In misty folds, that floating as they fell 35 

Lit up a torrent-bow. 

And high on every peak a statue seem'd 

To hang on tiptoe, tossing up 
A cloud of incense of all odour steam'd 

From out a golden cup. 40 

So that she thought, ' And who shall gaze upon 

My palace with unblinded eyes, 
While this great bow will waver in the sun. 
And that sweet incense rise ? ' 

For that sweet incense rose and never fail'd, 45 

And, while day sank or mounted higher, 
The light aerial gallery, golden-rail'd. 
Burnt like a fringe of fire. 

Likewise the deep-set windows, stain'd and traced, 

Would seem slow-flaming crimson fires 50 

From shadow'd grots of arches interlaced, 
And tipt with frost-like spires. 



THE PALACE OF ART 223 



Full of long-sounding corridors it was, 

That over-vaulted grateful gloom, 
Thro' which the livelong day my soul did pass, 55 

Well-pleased, from room to room. 

Full of great rooms and small the palace stood, 

All various, each a perfect whole 
From living Nature, fit for every mood 

And change of my still soul. 60 

For some were hung with arras green and blue, 

Showing a gaudy summer-morn, 
Where with puff'd cheek the belted hunter blew 
His wreathed bugle-horn. 

One seem'd all dark and red — a tract of sand, 65 

And some one pacing there alone. 
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land. 
Lit with a low large moon. 

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 

You seem'd to hear them climb and fall 70 

And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves. 
Beneath the windy wall. 

And one, a full-fed river winding slow 

By herds upon an endless plain, 
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 75 

With shadow-streaks of rain. 



224 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil. 

In front they bound the sheaves. Behind 
Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil, 

And hoary to the wind. 80 

And one a foreground black with stones and slags, 

Beyond, a line of heights, and higher 
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags. 
And highest, snow and fire. 

And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd 85 

On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 
A haunt of ancient Peace. 

Nor these alone, but every landscape fair. 

As fit for every mood of mind, 90 

Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern, was there 
Not less than truth design'd. 



Or the maid-mother by a crucifix, 
In tracts of pasture sunny- warm. 
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx 95 

Sat smiling, babe in arm. 

Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea. 
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair 
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily ; 

An angel look'd at her. 100 



THE PALACE OF ART 225 

Or thronging all one porch of Paradise 

A group of Houris bow'd to see 
The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes 
That said, We wait for thee. 

Or mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son 105 

In some fair space of sloping greens 
Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon, 
And watch'd by weeping queens. 

Or hollowing one hand against his ear, 

To list a foot-fall, ere he saw no 

The wood-nymph, stay'd the Ausonian king to hear 
Of wisdom and of law. 

Or over hills with peaky tops engrail'd, 
And many a tract of palm and rice, 
The throne of Indian Cama slowly sail'd 115 

A summer fann'd with spice. 

Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd. 
From off her shoulder backward borne : 
From one hand droop'd a crocus : one hand grasp'd 

The mild bull's golden horn. 120 

Or else flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh 

Half-buried in the Eagle's down, 
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky 
Above the pillar'd town. 

Nor these alone : but every legend fair 125 

Which the supreme Caucasian mind 
Carved out of Nature for itself, was there, 
Not less than life, design'd. 



226 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 



Then in the towers I placed great bells that swung, 

Moved of themselves, with silver sound ; 130 

And with choice paintings of wdse men I hung 
The royal dais round. 

For there was Milton Hke a seraph strong, 
Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild ; 
And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd his song, 135 
And somew^hat grimly smiled. 

And there the Ionian father of the rest; 

A million wrinkles carved his skin; 
A hundred winters snow'd upon his breast, 

From cheek and throat and chin. 140 

Above, the fiiir hall-ceiling stately-set 

Many an arch high up did Hft, 
And angels rising and descending met 
With interchange of gift. 

Below was all mosaic choicely plann'd 145 

With cycles of the human tale 
Of this wide world, the times of every land 
So wrought, they will not foil. 

The people here, a beast of burden slow, 

Toil'd onward, prick'd with goads and stings; • 150 
Here play'd, a tiger, rolling to and fro 
The heads and crowns of kings; 



THE PALACE OF ART 22/ 

Here rose, an athlete, strong to break or bind 

All force in bonds that might endure, 
And here once more like some sick man declined, 155 
And trusted any cure. 

But over these she trod : and those great bells 

Began to chime. She took her throne : 
She sat betwixt the shining Oriels, 

To sing her songs alone. 160 

And thro' the topmost Oriels' coloured flame 

Two godlike faces gazed below ; 
Plato the wise, and large-brow'd \'erulam, 
The first of those who know. 

And all those names, that in their motion were 165 

Full-welling fountain-heads of change. 
Betwixt the slender shafts were blazon'd fair 
In diverse raiment strange : 

Thro' which the lights, rose, amber, emerald, blue, 

Flush'd in her temples and her eyes, 170 

And from her Hps, as morn from Memnon, drew 
Rivers of melodies. 

No nightingale delighteth to prolong 

Her low preamble all alone, 
More than my soul to hear her echo'd song 175 

Throb thro' the ribbed stone ; 

Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth. 

Joying to feel herself alive. 
Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible earth, 

Lord of the senses five ; 180 



228 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

Communing with herself: 'All these are mine, 

And let the world have peace or wars, 
'Tis one to me.' She — when young night divine 
Crown'd dying day with stars, 

Making sweet close of his delicious toils — 185 

Lit light in wreaths and anadems, 
And pure quintessences of precious oils 
In hollow'd moons of gems, 

To mimic heaven; and clapt her hands and cried, 

*I marvel if my still delight 190 

In this great house so royal-rich, and wide. 
Be flatter'd to the height. 

' O all things fair to sate my various eyes ! 

shapes and hues that please me well ! 

O silent faces of the Great and Wise, 195 

My Gods, with whom I dwell ! 

'O God-Kke isolation which art mine, 

1 can but count thee perfect gain, 

What time I watch the darkening droves of swine 

That range on yonder plain. 200 

* In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin. 
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep ; 
And oft some brainless devil enters in. 
And drives them to the deep.' 

Then of the moral instinct would she prate 205 

And of the rising from the dead. 
As hers by right of full-accomplish'd Fate ; 
And at the last she said : 



THE PALACE OF ART 229 

* I take possession of man's mind and deed. 

I care not what the sects may brawl. 210 

I sit as God holding no form of creed, 
But contemplating all.' 

* * * * # 

***** 

Full oft the riddle of the painful earth 

Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone, 
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth, 215 

And intellectual throne. 

And so she throve and prosper'd : so three years 

She prosper'd : on the fourth she fell, 
Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears. 

Struck thro' with pangs of hell. 220 

Lest she should fail and perish utterly, 

God, before whom ever lie bare 
The abysmal deeps of Personality, 
Plagued her with sore despair. 

When she would think, where'er she turn'd her sight 225 

The airy hand confusion wrought, 
Wrote, ' Mene, mene,' and divided quite 
The kingdom of her thought. 

Deep dread and loathing of her solitude 

Fell on her, from which mood was born 230 

Scorn of herself; again, from out that mood 
Laughter at her self-scorn. 



230 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

' What ! is not this my place of strength,' she said, 

* My spacious mansion built for me, 
Whereof the strong foundation-stones were laid 

Since my first memory ? ' 

But in dark corners of her palace stood 

Uncertain shapes ; and unawares 
On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood, 
And horrible nightmares, 

And hollow shades, enclosing hearts of flame. 

And, with dim fretted foreheads all. 
On corpses three-months-old at noon she came, 
That stood against the wall. 

A spot of dull stagnation, without light 

Or power of movement, seem'd my soul, 
'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite 
Making for one sure goal. 

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, 

Left on the shore ; that hears all night 
The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white. 

A star that with the choral starry dance 

Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw 
The hollow orb of moving Circumstance 
Roll'd round by one fix'd law. 

Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd. 

* No voice,' she shriek'd in that lone hall, 

' No voice breaks thro' the stillness of this world : 
One deep, deep silence all ! ' 



THE PALACE OF ART 23 1 

She, mouldering with the dull earth's mouldering sod, 

Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame, 
Lay there exiled from eternal God, 
Lost to her place and name ; 

And death and Hfe she hated equally, 265 

And nothing saw, for her despair. 
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity. 
No comfort anywhere ; 

Remaining utterly confused with fears. 

And ever worse with growing time, 270 

And ever unreUeved by dismal tears. 
And all alone in crime : 

Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round 

With blackness as a solid wall, 
Far off she seem'd to hear the dully sound 275 

Of human footsteps fall. 

As in strange lands a traveller walking slow. 

In doubt and great perplexity, 
A little before moon-rise hears the low 

Moan of an unknown sea ; 280 

And knows not if it be thunder, or a sound 

Of rocks thrown down, or one deep cry 
Of great wild beasts ; then thinketh, ' I have found 
A new land, but I die.' 

She howl'd aloud, ' I am on fire within. 285 

There comes no murmur of reply. 
What is it that will take away my sin, 
And save me lest I die ? ' 



232 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

So when four years were wholly finished, 

She threw her royal robes away. 
' Make me a cottage m the vale,' she said, 
'Where I may mourn and pray. 

' Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are 

So lightly, beautifully built: 
Perchance I may return with others there 
When I have purged my guilt.' 



MERLIN AND THE GLEAM 



O YOUNG Mariner, 
You from the haven 
Under the sea-chff. 
You that are watching 
The gray Magician 
With eyes of wonder, 
/ am Merhn, 
And / am dying, 
/ am Merlin 
Who follow The Gleam. 



Mighty the Wizard 
Who found me at sunrise 
Sleeping, and woke me 
And learn'd me Magic ! 
Great the Master, 
And sweet the Magic, 



290 



MERLIN AND THE GLEAM 233 

When over the valley, 
In early summers, 
Over the mountain, 
On human faces, 
And all around me, 
Moving to melody, 
Floated The Gleam. 



Ill 

Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it, 

A barbarous people, 25 

Blind to the magic, 

And deaf to the melody, 

Snarl'd at and cursed me. 

A demon vext me. 

The light retreated, 30 

The landskip darken'd. 

The melody deaden'd. 

The Master whisper'd, 

* Follow The Gleam.' 



IV 

Then to the melody, 35 

Over a wilderness » 

Gliding, and glancing at 

Elf of the woodland. 

Gnome of the cavern. 

Griffin and Giant, 40 

And dancing of Fairies 

In desolate hollows, 

And wraiths of the mountain, 

And rolling of dragons 



234 



OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

By warble of water, 45 

Or cataract music 
Of falling torrents, 
Flitted The Gleam. 

V 

Down from the mountain 

And over the level, 5° 

And streaming and shining on 

Silent river. 

Silvery willow, 

Pasture and plowland, 

Innocent maidens, 55 

Garrulous children, 

Homestead and harvest. 

Reaper and gleaner, 

And rough-ruddy faces 

Of lowly labour, 6o 

Slided The Gleam — 

VI 

Then, with a melody 

Stronger and statelier. 

Led me at length 

To the city and palace 65 

Of Arthur the king ; 

Touch'd at the golden 

Cross of the churches, 

Flash'd on the Tournament, 

FHcker'd and bicker'd 7° 

From helmet to helmet. 

And last on the forehead 

Of Arthur the blameless 

Rested The Gleam. 



MERLIN AND THE GLEAM 235 

VII 

Clouds and darkness 75 

Closed upon Camelot ; 

Arthur had vanish'd 

I knew not whither, 

The king who loved me, 

And cannot die ; 80 

For out of the darkness 

Silent and slowly 

The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer 

On icy fallow 

And flided forest, 85 

Drew to the valley 

Named of the shadow, 

And slowly brightening 

Out of the glimmer, 

And slowly moving again to a melody 90 

Yearningly tender, 

Fell on the shadow, 

No longer a shadow, 

But clothed with The Gleam. 

• 

VIII 

And broader and brighter 95 

The Gleam flying onward, 

Wed to the melody, 

Sang thro' the world; 

And slower and fainter, 

Old and weary, 100 

But eager to follow, 

I saw, whenever 

In passing it glanced upon 



236 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 



Hamlet or city, 

That under the Crosses 105 

The dead man's garden, 

The mortal hillock, 

Would break into blossom ; 

And so to the land's 

Last limit I came ^lo 

And can no longer. 

But die rejoicing, 

For thro' the Magic 

Of Him the Mighty, 

Who taught me in childhood, 115 

There on the border 

Of boundless Ocean, 

And all but in Heaven 

Hovers The Gleam. 



Not of the sunlight, 120 

Not of the moonlight, 

Not of the starlight ! 

O young Mariner, ^ 

Down to the haven. 

Call your companions, 125 

Launch your vessel. 

And crowd your canvas. 

And, ere it vanishes 

Over the margin. 

After it, follow it, 130 

Follow The Gleam. 



FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE' 237 



'FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE' 

Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row ! 
So they row'd, and there we landed — ' O venusta Sirmio ! ' 
There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer glow, 
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, 
Came that ' Ave atque Vale ' of the Poet's hopeless woe, 
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago, 
' Frater Ave atque Vale,' — as we wander'd to and fro. 
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below. 
Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio ! 



TO VIRGIL 

WRI'lTEN AT THE REQUEST OF THE IMANTUANS FOR THE 
NINETEENTH CENTENARY OF Vn<(;iL'S DEATH 



Roman Virgil, thou that singest 

Dion's lofty temples robed in fire, 

Ilion falling, Rome arising, 

wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre ; 



Landscape-lover, lord of language 

more than he that sang the Works and Days, 
All the chosen coin of fancy 

flashing out from many a golden phrase ; 



238 OF THE POET AND HIS ART 

III 
Thou that singest wheat and woodland, 

tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd ; 5 

All the charm of all the Muses 

often flowering in a lonely word ; 

IV 

Poet of the happy Tityrus 

piping underneath his beechen bowers; 
Poet of the poet-satyr 

whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers; 

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying 

in the bhssful years again to be, 
Summers of the snakeless meadow, 

unlaborious earth and oarless sea; 10 

VI 

Thou that seest Universal 

^ Nature moved by Universal Mind ; 

Thou majestic in thy sadness 

At the doubtful doom of human kind ; 

VII 

Light among the vanish'd ages; 

star that gildest yet this phantom shore ; 
Golden branch amid the shadows, 

kings and realms that pass to rise no more ; 

VIII 

Now thy Forum roars no longer, 

fallen every purple Caesar's dome — 15 

Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm 

sound for ever of Imperial Rome — 



MILTON 239 



IX 



Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd, 

and the Rome of freemen holds her place, 

I, from out the Northern Island 

sunder'd once from all the human race. 



I salute thee, Mantovano, 

I that loved thee since my day began, 
Wielder of the stateliest measure 

ever moulded by the lips of man. 



MILTON 

A/caics 

O migh'I'V-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, 
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, 
God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages ; 
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, 5 

Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, 
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean 
Rings to the roar of an angel onset — 
Me rather all that bowery loneliness. 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, 10 

And bloom profuse and cedar arches 
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, 
Where some refulgent sunset of India 
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle. 

And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 15 

Whisper in odorous heights of even. 



240 OF PATRIOTISM 



(2) OF PATRIOTISM 

"OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS" 

Of old sat Freedom on the heights, 
The thunders breaking at her feet ; 

Above her shook the starry lights : 
She heard the torrents meet. 

There in her place she did rejoice, 
Self-gather'd in her prophet-mind. 

But fragments of her mighty voice 
Came rolHng on the wind. 

Then stept she down thro' town and field 
To mingle with the human race, 

And part by part to men reveal'd 
The fullness of her face — 

Grave mother of majestic works, 

From her isle-altar gazing down. 

Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks, 
And, King-like, wears the crown : 

Her open eyes desire the truth. 

The wisdom of a thousand years 
Is in them. May perpetual youth 

Keep dry their light from tears; 

That her fair form may stand and shine. 

Make bright our days and light our dreams, 

Turning to scorn with lips divine 
The falsehood of extremes ! 



ENGLAND AND AMERICA IN 1782 241 



ENGLAND AND AMERICA IN 1782 

O THOU, that sendest out the man 

To rule by land and sea, 
Strong mother of a Lion-line, 
Be proud of those strong sons of thine 

Who wrench'd their rights from thee ! 

What wonder, if in noble heat 

Those men thine arms withstood, 

Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught, 

And in thy spirit with thee fought — 

Who sprang from English blood ! 

But Thou rejoice with liberal joy, 

Lift up thy rocky face, 
And shatter, when the storms are black, 
In many a streaming torrent back. 

The seas that shock thy base ! 

Whatever harmonies of law 

The growing world assume, 
Thy work is thine — The single note 
From that deep chord which Hampden smote 

Will vibrate to the doom. 



242 OF PATRIOTISM 

TO THE QUEEN 

Revered, beloved — O you that hold 
A nobler office upon earth 
Than arms, or power of brain, or birth 

Could give the warrior kings of old, 

Victoria, — since your Royal grace 
To one of less desert allows 
This laurel greener from the brows 

Of him that utter'd nothing base ; 

And should your greatness, and the care 
That yokes with empire, yield you time 
To make demand of modern rhyme 

If aught of ancient worth be there ; 

Then — while a sweeter music wakes, 
And thro' wild March the throstle calls, 
Where all about your palace-walls 

The sun-lit almond-blossom shakes — 

Take, Madam, this poor book of song ; 
For tho' the faults were thick as dust 
In vacant chambers, I could trust 

Your kindness. May you rule us long. 

And leave us rulers of your blood 
As noble till the latest day ! 
May children of our children say, 

' She wrought her people lasting good ; 

* Her court was pure ; her life serene ; 

God gave her peace ; her land reposed ; 

A thousand claims to reverence closed 
In her as Mother, Wife, and Queen ; 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 243 

'And statesmen at her council met 

Who knew the seasons when to take 30 

Occasion by the hand, and make 
The bounds of freedom wider yet 

' By shaping some august decree, 

Which kept her throne unshaken still. 
Broad-based upon her people's will, 35 

And compass'd by the inviolate sea.' 

March^ 1851. 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF 
WELLINGTON 

PUBLISHED I\ 1852 



Bury the Great Duke 

With an empire's lamentation, 
Let us bury the Great Duke 

To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation. 
Mourning when their leaders fall. 
Warriors carry the warrior's pall, 
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall. 



Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore? 

Here, in streaming London's central roar. 

Let the sound of those he wrought for, 10 

And the feet of those he fought for, 

Echo round his bones for evermore. 



244 



OF PATRIOTISM 



III 



Lead out the pageant : sad and slow, 

As fits an universal woe, 

Let the long long procession go, 15 

And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow, 

And let the mournful martial music blow; 

The last great Englishman is low. 

IV 

Mourn, for to us he seems the last, 

Remembering all his greatness in the Past. 20 

No more in soldier fashion will he greet 

With lifted hand the gazer in the street. 

O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute : 

Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood, 

The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, 25 

Whole in himself, a common good. 

Mourn for the man of amplest influence. 

Yet clearest of ambitious crime, 

Our greatest yet with least pretence, 

Great in council and great in war, 30 

Foremost captain of his time, 

Rich in saving common-sense, 

And, as the greatest only are, 

In his simplicity sublime. 

O good gray head which all men knew, 35 

O voice from which their omens all men drew, 

O iron nerve to true occasion true, 

O fall'n at length that tower of strength 

Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew ! 

Such was he whom we deplore. 4© 

The long self-sacrifice of life is o'er. 

The great World-victor's victor will be seen no more. 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 245 

V 

All is over and done : 

Render thanks to the Giver, 

England, for thy son. 45 

Let the bell be toll'd. 

Render thanks to the Giver, 

And render him to the mould. 

Under the cross of gold 

That shines over city and river, 50 

There he shall rest for ever 

Among the wise and the bold. 

Let the bell be toll'd : 

And a reverent people behold 

The towering car, the sable steeds : 55 

Bright let it be with its blazon'd deeds. 

Dark in its funeral fold. 

Let the bell be toll'd : 

And a deeper knell in the heart be knoll'd ; 

And the sound of the sorrowing anthem roll'd 60 

Thro' the dome of the golden cross ; 

And the volleying cannon thunder his loss ; 

He knew their voices of old. 

For many a time in many a clime 

His captain's-ear has heard them boom 65 

Bellowing victory, bellowing doom : 

When he with those deep voices wrought, 

Guarding realms and kings from shame ; 

With those deep voices our dead captain taught 

The tyrant, and asserts his claim 70 

In that dread sound to the great name. 

Which he has worn so pure of blame. 

In praise and in dispraise the same, 

A man of well-attemper'd frame. 



246 OF PATRIOTISM 

O civic muse, to such a name, 75 

To such a name for ages long, 

To such a name, 

Preserve a broad approach of fame, 

And ever-echoing avenues of song. 

VI 

Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest, 80 

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest. 

With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest? 

Mighty Seaman, this is he 

Was great by land as thou by sea. 

Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man, 85 

The greatest sailor since our world began. 

Now, to the roll of muffled drums. 

To thee the greatest soldier comes ; 

For this is he 

Was great by land as thou by sea ; 9° 

His foes were thine ; he kept iis free ; 

O give him welcome, this is he 

Worthy of our gorgeous rites. 

And worthy to be laid by thee ; 

For this is England's greatest son, 95 

He that gain'd a hundred fights, 

Nor ever lost an English gun ; 

This is he that far away 

Against the myriads of Assaye 

Clash'd with his fiery few and won ; 100 

And underneath another sun. 

Warring on a later day. 

Round affrighted Lisbon drew 

The treble works, the vast designs 

Of his labour'd rampart-lines, 105 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 247 

Where he greatly stood at bay, 

Whence he issued forth anew, 

And ever great and greater grew, 

Beating from the wasted vines 

Back to France her banded swarms, no 

Back to France with countless blows, 

Till o'er the hills her eagles flew 

Beyond the Pyrenean pines, 

Follow'd up in valley and glen 

With blare of bugle, clamour of men, 115 

Roll of cannon and clash of arms, 

And England pouring on her foes. 

Such a war had such a close. 

Again their ravening eagle rose 

In anger, wheel'd on Europe-shadowing wings, 120 

And barking for the thrones of kings ; 

Till one that sought but Duty's iron crown 

On that loud sabbath shook the spoiler down ; 

A day of onsets of despair 1 

Dash'd on every rocky square 125 

Their surging charges foam'd themselves away ; 

Last, the Prussian trumpet blew ; 

Thro' the long-tormented air 

Heaven flash'd a sudden jubilant ray, 

And down we swept and charged and overthrew. 130 

So great a soldier taught us there. 

What long-enduring hearts could do 

In that world-earthquake, W'aterloo ! 

Mighty Seaman, tender and true. 

And pure as he from taint of craven guile, 135 

O saviour of the silver-coasted isle, 

O shaker of the Baltic and the Nile, 

If aught of things that here befall 



248 OF PATRIOTISM 

Touch a spirit among things divine, 

If love of country move thee there at all, 

Be glad, because his bones are laid by thine ! 

And thro' the centuries let a people's voice 

In full acclaim, 

A people's voice. 

The proof and echo of all human fame, 

A people's voice, when they rejoice 

At civic revel and pomp and game. 

Attest their great commander's claim 

With honour, honour, honour, honour to him, 

Eternal honour to his name. 

VII 

A people's voice ! we are a people yet. 
Tho' all men else their nobler dreams forget, 
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers ; 
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set 
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers. 
We have a voice, with which to pay the debt 
Of boundless love and reverence and regret 
To those great men who fought, and kept it ours. 
And keep it ours, O God, from brute control ; 
O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul 
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole, 
And save the one true seed of freedom sown 
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne, 
That sober freedom out of which there springs 
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings ; 
For, saving that, ye help to save mankind 
Till public wrong be crumbled into dust. 
And drill the raw world for the march of mind, 
Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just. 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 249 

But wink no more in slothful overtrust. 170 

Remember him who led your hosts ; 

He bade you guard the sacred coasts. 

Your cannons moulder on the seaward wall ; 

His voice is silent in your council-hall 

For ever; and whatever tempests lour 175 

For ever silent ; even if they broke 

In thunder, silent ; yet remember all 

He spoke among you, and the Man who spoke ; 

Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, 

Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power; 180 

Who let the. turbid streams of rumour flow 

Thro' either babbling world of high and low ; 

Whose life was work, whose language rife 

With rugged maxims hewn from life ; 

Who never spoke against a foe ; 185 

Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke 

All great self-seekers trampling on the right : 

Truth-teller was our England's Alfred named ; 

Truth-lover was our English Duke ; 

Whatever record leap to light 190 

He never shall be shamed. 

VIII 

Lo, the leader in these glorious wars 

Now to glorious burial slowly borne, 

FoUow'd by the brave of other lands. 

He, on whom from both her open hands 195 

Lavish Honour shower'd all her stars, 

And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn. 

Yea, let all good things await 

Him who cares not to be great. 

But as he saves or serves the state. 200 



250 OF PATRIOTISM 

Not once or twice in our rough island-story, 

The path of duty was the way to glory : 

He that walks it, only thirsting 

For the right, and learns to deaden 

Love of self, before his journey closes, 205 

He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 

Into glossy purples, which outredden 

All voluptuous garden-roses. 

Not once or twice in our fair island-story. 

The path of duty was the way to glory : 210 

He, that ever following her commands. 

On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 

Thro' the long gorge to the far Hght has won 

His path upward, and prevail'd, 

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 215 

Are close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our God Himself is moon and sun. 

Such was he : his work is done. 

But while the races of mankind endure, 

Let his great example stand 220 

Colossal, seen of every land. 

And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure: 

Till in all lands and thro' all human story 

The path of duty be the way to glory : 

And let the land whose hearths he saved from shame 225 

For many and many an age proclaim 

At civic revel and pomp and game, 

And when the long-illumined cities flame, 

Their ever-loyal iron leader's fame, 

With honour, honour, honour, honour to him, 230 

Eternal honour to his name. 



u 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 25 1 

IX 

Peace, his triumph will be sung 

By some yet unmoulded tongue 

Far on in summers that we shall not see : 

Peace, it is a day of pain 235 

For one about whose patriarchal knee 

Late the little children clung : 

O peace, it is a day of pain 

For one, upon whose hand and heart and brain 

Once the weight and fate of Europe hung. 240 

Ours the pain, be his the gain ! 

More than is of man's degree 

Must be with us, watching here 

At this, our great solemnity. 

Whom we see not we revere ; 245 

We revere, and we refrain 

From talk of battles loud and vain, 

And brawling memories all too free 

For such a wise humility 

As befits a solemn fane : 250 

We revere, and while we hear 

The tides of Music's golden sea 

Setting toward eternity, 

UpHfted high in heart and hope are we, 

Until we doubt not that for one so true 255 

There must be other nobler work to do 

Than when he fought at Waterloo, 

And Victor he must ever be. 

For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill 

And break the shore, and evermore 260 

Make and break, and work their will ; 

Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll 

Round us, each with different powers, 



\i 



252 



OF PATRIOTISM 

And other forms of life than ours, 

What know we greater than the soul? 265 

On God and Godlike men we build our trust. 

Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears : 

The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears : 

The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; 270 

He is gone who seem'd so great. — 

Gone ; but nothing can bereave him 

Of the force he made his own 

Being here, and we beUeve him 

Something far advanced in State, 275 

And that he wears a truer crown 

Than any wreath that man can weave him. 

Speak no more of his renown, 

Lay your earthly fancies down. 

And in the vast cathedral leave him, 280 

God accept him, Christ receive him. 



THE VISION OF SIN 253 

(3) OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 
THE VISION OF SIN 



I HAD a vision when the night was late : 

A youth came riding toward a palace-gate. 

He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown, 

But that his heavy rider kept him down. 

And from the palace came a child of sin, 5 

And took him by the curls, and led him in. 

Where sat a company with heated eyes, 

Expecting when a fountain should arise : 

A sleepy light upon their brows and lips — 

As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse, 10 

Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes — 

Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes, 

By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes. 

II 
Then methought I heard a mellow sound, 
Gathering up from all the lower ground; 15 

Narrowing in to where they sat assembled 
Low voluptuous music winding trembled, 
Wov'n in circles : they that heard it sigh'd, 
Panted hand-in-hand with faces pale. 

Swung themselves, and in low tones replied ; 20 

Till the fountain spouted, showering wide 
Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail ; 
Then the music touch'd the gates and died ; 
Rose again from where it seem'd to fail, 
Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale; 25 



254 <^F THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Till thronging in and in, to where they waited, 

As 't were a hundred-throated nightingale, 

The strong tempestuous treble throbb'd and palpitated ; 

Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound, 

Caught the sparkles, and in circles, 30 

Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes, 

Flung the torrent rainbow round : 

Then they started from their places, 

Moved with violence, changed in hue, 

Caught each other with wild grimaces, 35 

Half-invisible to the view, 

^Vheeling with precipitate paces 

To the melody, till they flew. 

Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces, 

Twisted hard in fierce embraces, 40 

Like to Furies, like to Graces, 

Dash'd together in blinding dew : 

Till, kill'd with some luxurious agony, 

The nerve-dissolving melody 

Flutter'd headlong from the sky. 45 



III 

And then I look'd up toward a mountain-trac t, 

That girt the region with high cliff and lawn : 

I saw that every morning, far withdrawn 

Beyond the darkness and the cataract, 

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn, 50 

Unheeded : and detaching, fold by fold. 

From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near, 

A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold. 

Came floating on for many a month and year, 

Unheeded : and I thought I would have spoken, 55 



THE VISION OF SIN 255 

And vvarn'd that madman ere it grew too late : 

But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken, 

When that cold vapour touch'd the palace gate, 

And link'd again. I saw within my head 

A gray and gap-tooth'd man as lean as death, 60 

Who slowly rode across a wither'd heath, 

And lighted at a ruin'd inn, and said : 



IV 

' Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin ! 

Here is custom come your way ; 
Take my brute, and lead him in, 65 

Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay. 

' Bitter barmaid, waning fast ! 

See that sheets are on my bed ; 
What ! the flower of life is past : 

It is long before you wed. 70 

* Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour, 

At the Dragon on the heath ! 
Let us have a quiet hour. 

Let us hob-and-nob with Death. 

' I am old, but let me drink ; 75 

Bring me spices, bring me wine ; 
1 remember, when I think, 

That my youth was half divine. 

'Wine is good for shrivell'd lips, 

When a blanket wraps the day, 80 

When the rotten woodland drips. 

And the leaf is stamp'd in clay. 



2S6 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

' Sit thee down, and have no shame, 
Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee : 

What care I for any name? 85 

What for order or degree? 

* Let me screw thee up a peg : 

Let me loose thy tongue with wine : 
Callest thou that thing a leg? 

Which is thinnest? thine or mine? 90 

' Thou shalt not be saved by works : 

Thou hast been a sinner too : 
Ruin'd trunks on wither'd forks, 

Empty scarecrows, I and you ! 

' Fill the cup, and fill the can : 95 

Have a rouse before the morn : 
Every moment dies a man. 

Every moment one is born. 

' We are men of ruin'd blood ; 

Therefore comes it we are wise. 100 

Fish are we that love the mud, 

Rising to no fancy-flies. 

* Name and fame ! to fly sublime 

Thro' the courts, the camps, the schools, 
Is to be the ball of Time, 105 

Bandied by the hands of fools. 

* Friendship ! — to be two in one — 

Let the canting liar pack ! 
Well I know, when I am gone. 

How she mouths behind my back. no 



THE VISION OF SIN 257 

* Virtue ! — to be good and just — 

Every heart, when sifted well, 
Is a clot of warmer dust, 

Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell. 

*0! we two as well can look 115 

Whited thought and cleanly life 
As the priest, above his book 

Leering at his neighbour's wife. 

' Fill the cup, and fill the can : 

Have a rouse before the morn : 120 

Every moment dies a man, 

Every moment one is born. 

* Drink, and let the j)arties rave : 

They are fill'd with idle spleen ; 
Rising, falling, like a wave, 125 

For they know not what they mean. 

*He that roars for liberty 

Faster binds a tyrant's power ; 
And the tyrant's cruel glee 

Forces on the freer hour. 130 

' Fill the can, and fill the cup : 

All the windy ways of men 
Are but dust that rises up. 

And is lightly laid again. 

* Greet her with applausive breath, 135 

Freedom, gaily doth she tread ; 
In her right a civic wreath. 
In her left a human head. 



258 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

'No, I love not what is new; 

She is of an ancient house : 
And I think we know the hue 

Of that cap upon her brows. 

* Let her go ! her thirst she slakes 

Where the bloody conduit runs, 
Then her sweetest meal she makes 
On the first-born of her sons. 

* Drink to lofty hopes that cool — 

Visions of a perfect State : 
Drink we, last, the public fool. 
Frantic love and frantic hate. 

' Chant me now some wicked stave. 
Till thy drooping courage rise. 

And the glow-worm of the grave 
GHmmer in thy rheumy eyes. 

* Fear not thou to loose thy tongue ; 

Set thy hoary fancies free ; 
What is loathsome to the young 
Savours well to thee and me. 

* Change, reverting to the years, 

When thy nerves could understand 
What there is in loving tears. 

And the warmth of hand in hand. 

'Tell me tales of thy first love — 
April hopes, the fools of chance ; 

Till the graves begin to move, 
And the dead begin to dance. 



THE VISION OF SIN 259 

* Fill the can, and fill the cup : 

All the windy ways of men 
Are but dust that rises up, 

And is lightly laid again. 170 



'Trooping from their mouldy dens 
The chap-fallen circle spreads : 

Welcome, fellow-citizens, 

Hollow hearts and empty heads 



'You are bones, and what of that? 175 

Every face, however full, 
Padded round with flesh and fat, 

Is but modell'd on a skull. 

' Death is king, and \'ivat Rex ! 

Tread a measure on the stones, 180 

Madam — if I know your sex. 

From the fashion of your bones. 

* No, I cannot praise the fire 

In your eye — nor yet your lip : 
All the more do I admire 185 

Joints of cunning workmanship. 

' Lo ! God's likeness — the ground-plan — 
Neither modell'd, glazed, nor framed : 

Buss me, thou rough sketch of man, 

Far too naked to be shamed ! 190 

* Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, 

While we keep a little breath ! 
Drink to heavy Ignorance ! 

Hob-and-nob with brother Death ! 



26o OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

'Thou art mazed, the night is long, 195 

And the longer night is near : 
What ! I am not all as wrong 

As a bitter jest is dear. 

'Youthful hopes, by scores, to all. 

When the locks are crisp and curl'd ; 200 

Unto me my maudhn gall 

And my mockeries of the world. 

' Fill the cup, and fill the can : 

Mingle madness, mingle scorn ! 
Dregs of life, and lees of man : 205 

Yet we will not die forlorn.' 



The voice grew faint : there came a further change 

Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range : 

Below were men and horses pierced with worms, 

And slowly quickening into lower forms ; 

By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross. 

Old plash of rains, and refuse patch'd with moss. 

Then some one spake : ' Behold ! it was a crime 

Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time.' 

Another said : ' The crime of sense became 

The crime of malice, and is equal blame.' 

And one : ' He had not wholly quench'd his pov/er : 

A little grain of conscience made him sour.' 

At last I heard a voice upon the slope 

Cry to the summit, ' Is there any hope ? ' 

To which an answer peal'd from that high land. 

But in a tongue no man could understand ; 

And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 261 

THE ANCIENT SAGE 

A THOUSAND summers ere the time of Christ 

From out his ancient city came a Seer 

Whom one that loved, and honour'd him, and yet 

Was no disciple, richly garb'd, but worn 

From wasteful living, follow'd — in his hand 5 

A scroll of verse — till that old man before 

A cavern whence an affluent fountain pour'd 

From darkness into daylight, turn'd and spoke. 

This wealth of waters might but seem to draw 

From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher, 10 

Yon summit half-a-league in air — and higher, 

The cloud that hides it — higher still, the heavens 

Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout 

The cloud descended. Force is from the heights. 

I am wearied of our city, son, and go 15 

To spend my one last year among the hills. 

What hast thou there? Some deathsong for the Ghouls 

To make their banquet relish? let me read. 

" How far thro' all the bloom and brake 

That nightingale is heard ! 20 

What power but the bird's could make 

This music in the bird? 
How summer-bright are yonder skies, 

And earth as fair in hue ! 
And yet what sign of aught that lies 25 

Behind the green and blue? 
But man to-day is fancy's fool 

As man hath ever been. 
The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule 

Were never heard or seen." 30 



262 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive 
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, 
There, brooding by the central altar, thou 
May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice. 
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 35 

As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know; 
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake 
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there 
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm. 
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 40 

The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, 
, And in the million-millionth of a grain 
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore. 
And ever vanishing, never vanishes. 

To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 45 

Or even than the Nameless is to me. 

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro' heaven. 
Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness. 
Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names. 

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 50 

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world 
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark. 

•'And since — from when this earth began — 

The Nameless never came 
Among us, never spake with man, 55 

And never named the Name " — 

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son. 

Nor canst thou prove the world thou mo vest in, 

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, 

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 60 

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one : 

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 263 

Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son, 

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee. 

Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 65 

For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 

Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise, 

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! 

She reels not in the storm of warring words, 70 

She brightens at the clash of ' Yes ' and ' No,' 

She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst, 

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night. 

She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, 

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 75 

She hears the lark within the songless egg. 

She finds the fountain where they wail'd * Mirage ' ! 

"What Power? aught akin to Mind, 

The mind in me and you? 
Or power as of the Gods gone blind 80 

Who see not what they do?" 

But some in yonder city hold, my son, 

That none but Gods could build this house of ours, 

So beautiful, vast, various, so beyond 

All work of man, yet, like all work of man, 85 

A beauty with defect till That which knows. 

And is not known, but felt thro' what we feel 

Within ourselves is highest, shall descend 

On this half-deed, and shape it at the last 

According to the Highest in the Highest. 90 

"What Power but the Years that make 

And break the vase of clay. 
And stir the sleeping earth, and wake 

The bloom that fades away? f^ ^ 



264 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

What rulers but the Days and Hours 95 

That cancel weal with woe, 
And wind the front of youth with flowers, 

And cap our age with snow?" 

The days and hours are ever glancing by, 
And seem to flicker past thro' sun and shade, 100 

Or short, or long, as Pleasure leads, or Pain ; 
But with the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour; 
Tho' we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought, 
Break into ^ Thens ' and ' Whens ' the Eternal Now : 
This double seeming of the single world ! — 105 

My words are like the babblings in a dream 
Of nightmare, when the babblings break the dream. 
But thou be wise in this dream-world of ours. 
Nor take thy dial for thy deity, 
But make the passing shadow serve thy will. no 

"The years that made the stripling wise 

Undo their work again. 
And leave him, blind of heart and eyes. 

The last and least of men ; 
Who clings to earth, and once would dare 115 

Hell-heat or Arctic cold. 
And now one breath of cooler air 

Would loose him from his hold ; 
His winter chills him to the root. 

He withers marrow and mind ; 120 

The kernel of the shrivell'd fruit 

Is jutting thro' the rind ; 
The tiger spasms tear ; his chest. 

The palsy wags his head ; 
The wife, the sons, who love him best 125 

Would fain that he were dead; 



/^ 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 265 

The griefs by which he once was wrung 
Were never worth the while " — 

Who knows? or whether this earth-narrow life 

Be yet but yolk, and forming in the shell? 130 

" The shaft of scorn that once had stung 
But wakes a dotard smile." 

The placid gleam of sunset after storm ! 

"The statesman's brain that sway'd the past 

Is feebler than his knees ; 135 

The passive sailor wrecks at last 

In ever-silent seas ; 
The warrior hath forgot his arms, 

The Learned all his lore ; 
The changing market frets or charms 140 

The merchant's hope no more ; 
The prophet's beacon burn'd in vain. 

And now is lost in cloud ; 
The plowman passes, bent with pain. 

To mix with what he plow'd ; 145 

The poet whom his Age would quote 

As heir of endless fame — 
He knows not ev'n the book he wrote, 

Not even his own name. 
For man has overlived his day, 150 

And, darkening in the light, 
Scarce feels the senses break away 

To mix with ancient Night." 

The shell must break before the bird can fly. ^ 



266 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

"The years that when my Youth began 155 

Had set the lily and rose 
By all my ways where'er they ran, 

Have ended mortal foes ; 
My rose of love for ever gone, 

My Hly of truth and trust — 160 

They made her lily and rose in one, 

And changed her into dust. 
O rosetree planted in my grief, 

And growing, on her tomb. 
Her dust is greening in your leaf, 165 

Her blood is in your bloom. 
O slender lily waving there, 

And laughing back the light, 
In vain you tell me ' Earth is fair ' 

When all is dark as night." 170 

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves, 

So dark that men cry out against the Heavens. 

Who knows but that the darkness is in man? 

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ; 

For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then 17 5 

Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all 

The splendours and the voices of the world ! 

And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet 

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore 

Await the last and largest sense to make 180 

The phantom walls of this illusion fade. 

And show us that the world is wholly fair. 

" But vain the tears for darken'd years 

As laughter over wine, 
And vain the laughter as the tears, 185 

O brother, mine or thine. 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 267 

" For all that laugh, and all that weep, 

And all that breathe are one 
Slight ripple on the boundless deep 

That moves, and all is gone." 190 

But that one ripple on the boundless deep 1 
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself ' 
For ever changing form, but evermore 
One with the boundless motion of the deep. 

" Yet wine and laughter friends ! and set 195 

The lamps alight, and call 
For golden music, and forget 

The darkness of the pall." 

If utter darkness closed the day, my son 

But earth's dark forehead flings athwart the heavens 200 

Her shadow crown'd with stars — and yonder — out 

To northward — some that never set, but pass 

From sight and night to lose themselves in day. 

I hate the black negation of the bier. 

And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves 205 

And higher, having climb'd one step beyond 

Our village miseries, might be borne in white 

To burial or to burning, hymn'd from hence 

With songs in praise of death, and crown'd with flowers ! 

"O worms and maggots of to-day 210 

Without their hope of wings ! " 

But louder than thy rhyme the silent Word 
Of that world-prophet in the heart of man. 

" Tho' some have gleams or so they say 
Of more than mortal things." 215 



268 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

To-day? but what of yesterday? for oft 

On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd. 

Who knew no books and no philosophies. 

In my boy-phrase 'The Passion of the Past.' 

The first gray streak of earhest summer-dawn, 220 

The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom. 

As if the late and early were but one — 

A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 

Had murmurs ' Lost and gone and lost and gone ! ' 

A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 225 

Desolate sweetness — far and far away — 

What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy? 

I know not and I speak of what has been. 

And more, my son ! for more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 230 

The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed. 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 
Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 235 
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world. 

" And idle gleams will come and go, 240 

But still the clouds remain;" 

The clouds themselves are children of the Sun. 

"And Night and Shadow rule below 
When only Day should reign." 

And Day and Night are children of the Sun, 245 

\ And idle gleams to thee are light to me. 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 269 

Some say, the Light was father of the Night, 

And some, the Night was father of the Light, 

No night no day ! — I touch thy world again — 

No ill no good ! such counter-terms, my son, 250 

Are border-races, holding, each its own 

By endless war : but night enough is there 

In yon dark city : get thee back : and since 

The key to that weird casket, which for thee 

But holds a skull, is neither thine nor mine, 255 

But in the hand of what is more than man, 

Or in man's hand when man is more than man, 

Let be thy wail and help thy fellow men. 

And make thy gold thy vassal not thy king, 

And fling free alms into the beggar's bowl, 260 

And send the day into the darken'd heart; 

Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men, 

A dying echo from a falling wall; 

Nor care — for Hunger hath the Evil eye — 

To vex the noon with fiery gems, or fold 265 

Thy presence in the silk of sumptuous looms; 

Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue. 

Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine ; 

Nor thou be rageful, like a handled bee, 

And lose thy life by usage of thy sting; 270 

Nor harm an adder thro' the lust for harm, 

Nor make a snail's horn shrink for wantonness; 

And more — think well ! Do-well will follow thought. 

And in the fatal sequence of this world 

An evil thought may soil thy children's blood; 275 

But curb the beast would cast thee in the mire. 

And leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness 

A cloud between the Nameless and thyself, 

And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel. 



270 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

And climb the Mount of Blessing, whence, if thou j8o 

Look higher, then — perchance — thou mayest — beyond 

A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, 

And past the range of Night and Shadow — see 

The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 

Strike on the Mount of Vision ! 

So, farewell. 285 



FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL' 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand. 

Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. 



THE HIGHER PANTHEISM 

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 

Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams ? 

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? 

Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; 

For is He not all but that which has power to feel ' I am I ' ? 



WILL 271 

Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfillest thy doom 
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom. 10 

Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can 

meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 

God is law, say the wise ; O Soul, and let us rejoice. 
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice. 

Law is God, say some : no God at all, says the fool ; 15 

For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool ; 

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see ; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He? 



WILL 



O WELL for him whose will is strong ! 

He suffers, but he will not suffer long ; 

He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong ; 

For him nor moves the loud world's random mock. 

Nor all Calamity's hugest waves confound, 

Who seems a promontory of rock, 

That, compass'd round with turbulent sound, 

In middle ocean meets the surging shock. 

Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crown 'd. 



But ill for him who, bettering not with time, 
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will, 



2^2 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime, 

Or seeming-genial venial fault, 

Recurring and suggesting still ! 

He seems as one whose footsteps halt, 

Toiling in immeasurable sand, 

And o'er a weary sultry land. 

Far beneath a blazing vault, 

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, 

The city sparkles Hke a grain of salt. 



WAGES 

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, 

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea — 

Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong — 
Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she : 

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. 5 

The wages of sin is death : if the wages of Virtue be dust, 
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm 
and the fly? 

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky : 

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. 10 



THE DESERTED HOUSE 273 

THE DESERTED HOUSE 



Life and Thought have gone away 

Side by side, 

Leaving door and windows wide ; 
Careless tenants they ! 



All within is dark as night : 5 

In the windows is no light; 
And no murmur at the door, 
So frequent on its hinge before. 

Ill 
Close the door, the shutters close, 

Or thro' the windows we shall see 10 

The nakedness and vacancy 
Of the dark deserted house. 

IV 

Come away : no more of mirth 

Is here or merry-making sound. 
The house was builded of the earth, 15 

And shall fall again to ground. 

V 

Come away : for Life and Thought 

Here no longer dwell; 
But in a city glorious — 
A great and distant city — have bought 20 

A mansion incorruptible. 
Would they could have stayed with us ! 



274 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

"BREAK, BREAK, BREAK" 

Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea ! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 

The thoughts that arise in me. 

O well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play ! 

O well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 

And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill; 

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still ! 

Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea ! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 

Will never come back to me. 



IN THE VALLEY OF CAUTERETZ 

All along the valley, stream that flashest white, 

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night, 

All along the valley, where thy waters flow, 

I walk'd with one I loved two and thirty years ago. 

All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day, 

The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away; 

For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed. 

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead. 

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, 

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 275 

SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM A. H. H. 

OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII 
PROLOGUE 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove ; 

Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; 5 

Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 
Thou madest Death ; and lo, thy foot 

Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 10 

He thinks he was not made to die ; 

And thou hast made him : thou art just. 

Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou : 

Our wills are ours, we know not how; 15 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be : 

They are but broken lights of thee. 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 20 

We have but faith : we cannot know ; 

For knowledge is of things we see; 

And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness : let it grow. 



276 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 25 

But more of reverence in us dwell; 
That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music as before. 

But vaster. We are fools and slight; 

We mock thee when we do not fear : 30 

But help thy fooHsh ones to bear; 
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. 

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me ; 

What seem'd my worth since I began; 

For merit lives from man to man, 35 

And not from man, O Lord, to thee. 

Forgive my grief for one removed. 

Thy creature, whom I found so fair. 
I trust he lives in thee, and there 

I find him worthier to be loved. 40 

Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 

Confusions of a wasted youth; 

Forgive them where they fail in truth. 
And in thy wisdom make me wise. jg.g^ 



I held it truth, with him who sings 

To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 

Of their dead selves to higher things. 

But who shall so forecast the years 

And find in loss a gain to match? 
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch 

The far-off interest of tears? 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 277 

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd, 

Let darkness keep her raven gloss : 10 

Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, 

To dance with death, to beat the ground, 

Than that the victor Hours should scorn 

The long result of Love, and boast, 

* Behold the man that loved and lost, 15 

But all he was is overworn.' 



VII 

Dark house, by which once more I stand 
Here in the long unlovely street, 
Doors, where my heart was used to beat 

So quickly, waiting for a hand, 

A hand that can be clasp'd no more — 5 

Behold me, for I cannot sleep. 

And like a guilty thing I creep 
At earliest morning to the door. 

He is not here ; but far away 

The noise of life begins again, 10 

And ghastly thro' the drizzHng rain 
On the bald street breaks the blank day. 

IX 

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore 
Sailest the placid ocean-plains 
With my lost Arthur's loved remains, 

Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. 



278 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

So draw him home to those that mourn 
In vain ; a favourable speed 
Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead 

Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn. 

All night no ruder air perplex 

Thy sHding keel, till Phosphor, bright 
As our pure love, thro' early light 

Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. 

Sphere all your lights around, above ; 

Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; 

Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, 
My friend, the brother of my love ; 

My Arthur, whom I shall not see 

Till all my widow'd race be run; 
Dear as the mother to the son. 

More than my brothers are to me. 

XI 

Calm is the morn without a sound, 
Calm as to suit a calmer grief. 
And only thro' the faded leaf 

The chestnut pattering to the ground : 

Calm and deep peace on this high wold, 

And on these dews that drench the furze, 
And all the silvery gossamers 

That twinkle into green and gold : 

Calm and still light on yon great plain 

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, 
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 
. To mingle with the bounding main : 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 279 

Calm and deep peace in this wide air, 
These leaves that redden to the fall ; 
And in my heart, if calm at all, 15 

If any calm, a calm despair : 

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, 

And waves that sway themselves in rest, 
And dead calm in that noble breast 

Which heaves but with the heaving deep. 20 



XIX 

The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darken'd heart that beat no more ; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore. 

And in the hearing of the wave. 

There twice a day the Severn fills ; 5 

The salt sea-water passes by. 

And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills. 

The Wye is hush'd nor moved along, 

And hush'd my deepest grief of all, 10 

When fill'd with tears that cannot fall, 

I brim with sorrow drowning song. 

The tide flows down, the wave again 

Is vocal in its wooded walls ; 

My deeper anguish also falls, 15 

And I can speak a little then. 



28o OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

XXI 

I sing to him that rests below, 

And, since the grasses round me wave, 
I take the grasses of the grave, 

And make them pipes whereon to blow. 

The traveller hears me now and then, 

And sometimes harshly will he speak : 
'This fellow would make weakness weak. 

And melt the waxen hearts of men.' 

Another answers, ' Let him be, 

He loves to make parade of pain, 
That with his piping he may gain 

The praise that comes to constancy.' 

A third is wroth : ' Is this an hour 
For private sorrow's barren song. 
When more and more the people throng 

The chairs and thrones of civil power? 

*A time to sicken and to swoon, 

When Science reaches forth her arms 
To feel from world to world, and charms 

Her secret from the latest moon ? ' 

Behold, ye speak an idle thing: 

Ye never knew the sacred dust : 
I do but sing because I must. 

And pipe but as the Hnnets sing : 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 281 

And one is glad ; her note is gay, 

For now her little ones have ranged ; 
And one is sad ; her note is changed, 

Because her brood is stol'n away. 



XXIII 

Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut, 

Or breaking into song by fits, 

Alone, alone, to where he sits, 
The Shadow cloak'd from head to foot, 

Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, 5 

I wander, often falling lame, 
And looking back to whence I came, 

Or on to where the pathway leads ; 

And crying, How changed from where it ran 

Thro' lands where not a leaf was dumb ; 10 

But all the lavish hills would hum 

The murmur of a happy Pan : 

When each by turns was guide to each, 
And Fancy light from Fancy caught, 
And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought 15 

Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech ; 

And all we met was fair and good. 

And all was good that Time could bring. 
And all the secret of the Spring 

Moved in the chambers of the blood ; 20 



282 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

And many an old philosophy 

On Argive heights divinely sang, 
And round us all the thicket rang 

To many a flute of Arcady. 

XXVII 

I envy not in any moods 

The captive void of noble rage, 
The Hnnet born within the cage, 

That never knew the summer woods ; 

I envy not the beast that takes 

His license in the field of time, 
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime. 

To whom a conscience never wakes ; 

Nor, what may count itself as blest, 

The heart that never plighted troth 
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; 

Nor any want-begotten rest. 

1 hold it true, whate'er befall ; 

I feel it, when I sorrow most; 

'T is better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 

XXVIII 

The time draws near the birth of Christ : 
The moon is hid ; the night is still ; 
The Christmas bells from hill to hill 

Answer each other in the mist. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 283 

Four voices of four hamlets round, 5 

From far and near, on mead and moor, 
Swell out and fail, as if a door 

Were shut between me and the sound : 

Each voice four changes on the wind. 

That now dilate, and now decrease, «o 

Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace, 

Peace and goodwill, to all mankind. 

This year 1 slept and woke with pain, 

I almost wish'd no more to wake, 

And that my hold on life would break 15 

Before I heard those bells again : 

But they my troubled spirit rule. 

For they controU'd me when a boy ; 

They bring me sorrow touch 'd with joy. 
The merry merry bells of Yule. 20 



XXXI 

When Lazarus left his charnel-cave, 

And home to Mary's house return'd, 
Was this demanded — if he yearn'd 

To hear her weeping by his grave? 

'Where wert thou, brother, those four days? 
There lives no record of reply, 
Which telling what it is to die 

Had surely added praise to praise. 



284 ^^ THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

From every house the neighbours met, 

The streets were fill'd with joyful sound, lo 

A solemn gladness even crown'd 
The purple brows of Olivet. 

Behold a man raised up by Christ ! 

The rest remaineth unreveal'd ; 

He told it not; or something seal'd 15 

The lips of that Evangelist. 



XXXII 

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer. 
Nor other thought her mind admits 
But, he was dead, and there he sits, 

And he that brought him back is there. 

Then one deep love doth supersede 
All other, when her ardent gaze 
Roves from the living brother's face, 

And rests upon the Life indeed. 

All subtle thought, all curious fears, 

Borne down by gladness so complete. 
She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet 

With costly spikenard and with tears. 

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers. 
Whose loves in higher love endure ; 
What souls possess themselves so pure, 

Or is there blessedness like theirs? 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 285 

XXXIII 

O thou that after toil and storm 

Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, 
Whose faith has centre everywhere, 

Nor cares to fix itself to form, 

Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 5 

Her early Heaven, her happy views ; 
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 

A Hfe that leads melodious days. 

Her faith thro' form is pure as thine, 

Her hands are quicker unto good : 10 

Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
To which she links a truth divine ! 

See thou, that countest reason ripe 

In holding by the law within. 

Thou fail not in a world of sin, 15 

And ev'n for want of such a type. 



XXXVI 

Tho' truths in manhood darkly join, 
Deep-seated in our mystic frame, 
We yield all blessing to the name 

Of Him that made them current coin ; 

For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers, 

Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
When truth embodied in a tale 

Shall enter in at lowly doors. 



286 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

And so the Word had breath, and wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds lo 

In loveliness of perfect deeds, 

More strong than all poetic thought; 

Which he may read that binds the sheaf. 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 15 

In roarings round the coral reef. 



XLV 

The baby new to earth and sky. 

What time his tender palm is prest 
Against the circle of the breast, 

Has never thought that ' this is I : ' 

But as he grows he gathers much. 

And learns the use of * I,' and 'me,' 
And finds * I am not what I see, 

And other than the things I touch.' 

So rounds he to a separate mind 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As thro' the frame that binds him in 

His isolation grows defined. 

This use may lie in blood and breath, 

Which else were fruitless of their due, 
Had man to learn himself anew 

Beyond the second birth of Death. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 287 

XLVII 

That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 

Remerging in the general Soul, 

Is faith as vague as all unsweet : r 

Eternal form shall still divide 

The eternal soul from all beside ; 
And I shall know him when we meet : 

And we shall sit at endless feast, 

Enjoying each the other's good : 10 

What vaster dream can hit the mood 

Of Love on earth? He seeks at least 

Upon the last and sharpest height, 

Before the spirits fade away, 

Some landing-place, to clasp and say, 15 

' Farewell ! We lose ourselves in light.' 



Be near me when my light is low, 

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
And tingle ; and the heart is sick, 

And all the wheels of Being slow. 

Be near me when the sensuous frame 

Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust; 
And Time, a maniac scattering dust. 

And Life, a Fury shnging flame. 



288 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Be near me when my faith is dry, 

And men the flies of latter spring, 
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing 

And weave their petty cells and die. 

Be near me when I fade away. 

To point the term of human strife, 
And on the low dark verge of life 

The twilight of eternal day. 



LIV 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. 
To pangs of nature, sins of will. 

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; 

That nothing walks with aimless feet; 

That not one life shall be destroy'd. 
Or cast as rubbish to the void. 

When God hath made the pile complete; 

That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, 

Or but subserves another's gain. 

Behold, we know not anything; 

I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all, 

And every winter change to spring. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 289 

So runs my dream : but what am I ? 

An infant crying in the night : 

An infant crying for the light : 
And with no language but a cry. 



LV 



The wish, that of the living whole 

No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 

The likest God within the soul? 



Are God and Nature then at strife, 5 

That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems. 

So careless of the single life ; 

That I, considering everywhere 

Her secret meaning in her deeds, 10 

And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear, 

I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 

Upon the great world's altar-stairs 15 

That slope thro' darkness up to God, 

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all. 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 20 



290 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

LXX 

I cannot see the features right, 

When on the gloom I strive to paint 
The face I know ; the hues are faint 

And mix with hollow masks of night; 

Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, 5 

A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, 
A hand that points, and palled shapes 

In shadowy thoroughfares of thought; 

And crowds that stream from yawning doors, 

And shoals of pucker 'd faces drive ; lo 

Dark bulks that tumble half alive, 

And lazy lengths on boundless shores; 

Till all at once beyond the will 

I hear a wizard music roll. 

And thro' a lattice on the soul 15 

Looks thy fair face and makes it still. 

LXXIV 

As sometimes in a dead man's face, 

To those that watch it more and more, 
A likeness, hardly seen before. 

Comes out — to some one of his race : 

So, dearest, now thy brows are cold, 5 

I see thee what thou art, and know 
Thy likeness to the wise below, 

Thy kindred with the great of old. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 291 

But there is more than I can see, 
And what I see I leave unsaid, 
Nor speak it, knowing Death has made 

His darkness beautiful with thee. 



LXXVIII 

Again at Christmas did we weave 

The holly round the Christmas hearth ; 
The silent snow possess'd the earth, 

And calmly fell our Christmas-eve : 

The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost, 5 

No wing of wind the region swept. 

But over all things brooding slept 
The quiet sense of something lost. 

As in the winters left behind, 

Again our ancient games had place, 10 

The mimic picture's breathing grace, 
And dance and song and hoodman-blind. 

Who show'd a token of distress? 

No single tear, no mark of pain : 

O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? 15 

O grief, can grief be changed to less? 

O last regret, regret can die ! 

No — mixt with all this mystic frame. 

Her deep relations are the same. 
But with long use her tears are dry. 20 



292 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

LXXXII 

I wage not any feud with Death 

For changes wrought on form and face ; 
No lower Hfe that earth's embrace 

May breed with him, can fright my faith. 

Eternal process moving on, 

From state to state the spirit walks; 

And these are but the shatter'd stalks. 
Or ruin'd chrysalis^ of one. 

Nor blame I Death, because he bare 
The use of virtue out of earth : 
I know transplanted human worth 

Will bloom to profit, otherwhere. 

For this alone on Death I wreak 

The wrath that garners in my heart : 
He put our lives so far apart 

We cannot hear each other speak. 

LXXXIII 

Dip down upon the northern shore, 
O sweet new-year delaying long; 
Thou doest expectant nature wrong; 

Delaying long, delay no more. 

What stays thee from the clouded noons, 
Thy sweetness from its proper place? 
Can trouble live with April days. 

Or sadness in the summer moons? 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 293 

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, 

The Httle speedwell's darling blue, 10 

Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew. 
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire. 

O thou new-year, delaying long, 

Delayest the sorrow in my blood. 

That longs to burst a frozen bud 15 

And flood a fresher throat with song. 



LXXXV 

This truth came borne with bier and pall, 

I felt it, when I sorrow'd most, 

'Tis better to have loved and lost. 
Than never to have loved at all — 

O true in word, and tried in deed, 5 

Demanding, so to bring relief 

To this which is our common grief, 
What kind of life is that I lead ; 

And whether trust in things above 

Be dimm'd of sorrow, or sustain'd ; 10 

And whether love for him have drain'd 

My capabilities of love ; 

Your words have virtue such as draws 

A faithful answer from the breast, 

Thro' Hght reproaches, half exprest, 15 

And loyal unto kindly laws. 



294 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

My blood an even tenor kept, 

Till on mine ear this message falls, 
That in Vienna's fatal walls 

God's finger touch'd him, and he slept. 20 

The great Intelligences fair 

That range above our mortal state, 

In circle round the blessed gate, 
Received and gave him welcome there ; 

And led him thro' the bHssful climes, 25 

And show'd him in the fountain fresh 
All knowledge that the sons of flesh 

Shall gather in the cycled times. 

But I remain'd, whose hopes were dim, 

Whose Hfe, whose thoughts were little worth, 30 
To wander on a darken'd earth, 

Where all things round me breathed of him. 

O friendship, equal-poised control, 

O heart, with kindliest motion warm, 

sacred essence, other form, 35 
O solemn ghost, O crowned soul ! 

Yet none could better know than I, 

How much of act at human hands 

The sense of human will demands 
By which we dare to live or die. 40 

Whatever way my days decline, 

1 felt and feel, tho' left alone. 
His being working in mine own, 

The footsteps of his life in mine ; 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 295 

A life that all the Muses deck'd 45 

With gifts of grace, that might express 
All-comprehensive tenderness, 

All-subtilising intellect : 

And so my passion hath not swerved 

To works of weakness, but I find 50 

An image comforting the mind, 
And in my grief a strength reserved. 

Likewise the imaginati\e woe, 

That loved to handle spiritual strife, 

Diffused the shock thro' all my life, 55 

But in the present broke the blow. 

My pulses therefore beat again 

For other friends that once I met ; 

Nor can it suit me to forget 
The mighty hopes that make us men. 60 

I woo your love : I count it crime 

To mourn for any overmuch ; 

I, the divided half of such 
A friendship as had master'd Time ; 

Which masters Time indeed, and is 65 

Eternal, separate from fears : 

The all-assuming months and years 
Can take no part away from this : 

But Summer on the steaming floods, 

And Spring that swells the narrow brooks, 70 

And Autumn, with a noise of rooks. 
That gather in the waning woods, 



296 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

And every pulse of wind and wave 

Recalls, in change of light or gloom, 

My old affection of the tomb, 75 

And my prime passion in the grave : 

My old affection of the tomb, 

A part of stillness, yearns to speak : 
'Arise, and get thee forth and seek 

A friendship for the years to come. 80 

' I watch thee from the quiet shore ; 

Thy spirit up to mine can reach; 

But in dear words of human speech 
We two communicate no more.' 

And I, ' Can clouds of nature stain 85 

The starry clearness of the free? 

How is it? Canst thou feel for me 
Some painless sympathy with pain ? ' 

And lightly does the whisper fall; 

* 'T is hard for thee to fathom this ; 90 

I triumph in conclusive bliss, 
And that serene result of all.' 

So hold I commerce with the dead ; 

Or so methinks the dead would say; 

Or so shall grief with symbols play 95 

And pining life be fancy-fed. 

Now looking to some settled end, 

That these things pass, and I shall prove 
A meeting somewhere, love with love, 

I crave your pardon, O my friend; 100 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 297 

If not so fresh, witH love as true, 

I, clasping brother-hands, aver 

I could not, if I would, transfer 
The whole I felt for him to you. 

For which be they that hold apart 105 

The promise of the golden hours? 

First love, first friendship, equal powers, 
That marry with the virgin heart. 

Still mine, that cannot but deplore, 

That beats within a lonely place, nc 

That yet remembers his embrace, 
But at his footstep leaps no more. 

My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest 

Quite in the love of what is gone, 

But seeks to beat in time with one 115 

That warms another living breast. 

Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring, 

Knowing the primrose yet is dear, 

The primrose of the later year, 
As not unlike to that of Spring. 120 



LXXXVI 

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air. 

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over brake and bloom 

And meadow, slowly breathing bare 



298 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT, 

The round of space, and rapt below 
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
And shadowing down the horned flood 

In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

The fever from my cheek, and sigh 

The full new life that feeds thy breath 
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 

111 brethren, let the fancy fly 



From belt to belt of crimson seas 

On leagues of odour streaming far, 

To where in yonder orient star 15 

A hundred spirits whisper * Peace.' 



LXXXVIII 

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, 

Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks, 

tell me where the senses mix, 
O tell me where the passions meet, 

Whence radiate : fierce extremes employ 5 

Thy spirits in the darkening leaf, 

And in the midmost heart of grief 
Thy passion clasps a secret joy : 

And 1 — my harp would prelude woe — 

1 cannot all command the strings; 10 
The glory of the sum of things 

Will flash along the chords and go. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 299 



XC 



He tasted love with half his mind, 

Nor ever drank the inviolate spring 
Where nighest heaven, who first could fling 

This bitter seed among mankind ; 

That could the dead, whose dying eyes 5 

Were closed with wail, resume their life, 
They would but find in child and wife 

An iron welcome when they rise : 

'T was well, indeed, when warm with wine, 

To pledge them with a kindly tear, 10 

To talk them o'er, to wish them here. 

To count their memories half divine ; 

But if they came who past away, 

Behold their brides in other hands; 

The hard heir strides about their lands, 15 

And will not yield them for a day. 

Yea, tho' their sons were none of these, 

Not less the yet-loved sire would make 
Confusion worse than death, and shake 

The pillars of domestic peace. 20 

Ah dear, but come thou back to me : 

Whatever change the years have wrought, 
I find not yet one lonely thought 

That cries against my wish for thee. 



300 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

XCVI 

You say, but with no touch of scorn, 

Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes 
Are tender over drowning flies. 

You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. 

I know not : one indeed I knew 5 

In many a subtle (Question versed. 
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first, 

But ever strove to make it true : 

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds. 

At last he beat his music out. 10 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, 

Believe me, than in half the creeds. 

He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind 15 

And laid them : thus he came at length 

To find a stronger faith his own ; 

And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 

And dwells not in the light alone, 20 

But in the darkness and the cloud, 
As over Sinai's peaks of old, 
While Israel made their gods of gold, 

Altho' the trumpet blew so loud. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 301 

CIV 

The time draws near the birth of Christ; 

The moon is hid, the night is still; 

A single church below the hill 
Is pealing, folded in the mist. 

A single peal of bells below. 

That wakens at this hour of rest 

A single murmur in the breast, 
That these are not the bells I know. 

Like strangers' voices here they sound, 
In lands where not a memory strays. 
Nor landmark breathes of other days, 

But all is new unhallow'd ground. 



CVI 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 

The flying cloud, the frosty light : 

The year is dying in the night; 
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 

Ring out the old, ring in the new, 5 

Ring, happy bells, across the snow : 
The year is going, let him go; 

Ring out the false, ring in the true. 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind. 

For those that here we see no more; „ 10 

Ring out the feud of rich and poor, 

Ring in redress to all mankind. 



302 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Ring out a slowly dying cause, 

And ancient forms of party strife; 

Ring in the nobler modes of life, 15 

With sweeter manners, purer laws. 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, 
The faithless coldness of the times ; 
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, 

But ring the fuller minstrel in. 20 

Ring out false pride in place and blood, 

The civic slander and the spite ; 

Ring in the love of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good. 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease ; 25 

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; 
Ring out the thousand wars of old. 

Ring in the thousand years of peace. 

Ring in the valiant man and free. 

The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 30 

Ring out the darkness of the land. 

Ring in the Christ that is to be. 



CXI 

The churl in spirit, up or down 

Along the scale of ranks, thro' all, 
To him who grasps a golden ball, 

By blood a king, at heart a clown ; 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 303 

The churl in spirit, howe'er he veil 5 

His want in forms for fashion's sake, 
Will let his coltish nature break 

At seasons thro' the gilded pale : 

For who can always act? but he, 

To whom a thousand memories call, 10 

Not being less but more than all 
The gentleness he seem'd to be, 

Best seem'd the thing he was, and join'd 

Each office of the social hour 

To noble manners, as the flower 15 

And native growth of noble mind ; 

Nor ever narrowness or spite, 

Or villain fancy fleeting by, 

Drew in the expression of an eye. 
Where God and Nature met in light ; 20 

And thus he bore without abuse 

The grand old name of gentleman. 

Defamed by every charlatan, 
And soil'd with all ignoble use. 



cxv 

Now fades the last long streak of snow, 
Now burgeons every maze of quick 
About the flowering squares, and thick 

By ashen roots the violets blow. 



304 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Now rings the woodland loud and long, 
The distance takes a loveUer hue, 
And drown'd in yonder living blue 

The lark becomes a sightless song. 

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea. 
The flocks are whiter down the vale, 
And milkier every milky sail 

On winding stream or distant sea; 

Where now the seamew pipes, or dives 
In yonder greening gleam, and fly 
The happy birds, that change their sky 

To build and brood ; that live their lives 

From land to land ; and in my breast 
Spring wakens too ; and my regret 
Becomes an April violet. 

And buds and blossoms Hke the rest. 



CXVIII 

Contemplate all this work of Time, 
The giant labouring in his youth ; 
Nor dream of human love and truth 

As dying Nature's earth and lime ; 

But trust that those we call the dead 
Are breathers of an ampler day 
For ever nobler ends. They say, 

The solid earth whereon we tread 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 305 

In tracts of fluent heat began, 

And grew to seeming-random forms, • 10 

The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
Till at the last arose the man ; 

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, 

The herald of a higher race, 

And of himself in higher place, 15 

If so he type this work of time 

Within himself, from more to more ; 
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe 
Like glories, move his course, and show 

That Hfe is not as idle ore, 20 

But iron dug from central gloom. 

And heated hot with burning fears. 

And dipt in baths of hissing tears. 
And batter'd with the shocks of doom 

To shape and use. Arise and fly 25 

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 

Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 



CXIX 

Doors, where my heart was used to beat 
So quickly, not as one that weeps 
I come once more ; the city sleeps ; 

I smell the meadow in the street ; 



306 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

I hear a chirp of birds ; I see 

• Betwixt the black fronts long- withdrawn 
A light-blue lane of early dawn, 
And think of early days and thee, 

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland, 

And bright the friendship of thine eye ; 
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh 

I take the pressure of thine hand. 



cxx 

I trust I have not wasted breath : 
I think we are not wholly brain, 
Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain, 

Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death 

Not only cunning casts in clay : 

Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 

At least to me? I would not stay. 

Let him, the wiser man who springs 

Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape, 

But I was bom to other things. 



CXXIII 

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 

O earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 

There where the long street roars hath been 
The stillness of the central sea. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 307 

The hills are shadows, and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands. 

Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 



But in my spirit will I dwell. 

And dream my dream, and hold it true 
For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, 

I cannot think the thing farewell. 



CXXIV 

That which we dare invoke to bless; 

Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt; 

He, They, One, All; within, without; 
The Power in darkness whom we guess; 

I found Him not in world or sun, 5 

Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; 

Nor thro' the questions men may try, 
The petty cobwebs we have spun : 

If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 

I heard a voice, ' Believe no more ' 10 

And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep; 

A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part, 

And like a man in wrath the heart 15 

Stood up and answer'd, * I have felt.' 



308 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

No, like a child in doubt and fear: 

But that blind clamour made me wise ; 
Then was I as a child that cries, 

But, crying, knows his father near; 

And what I am beheld again 

What is, and no man understands ; 
And out of darkness came the hands 

That reach thro' nature, moulding men. 



CXXVI 

Love is and was my Lord and King, 
And in his presence I attend 
To hear the tidings of my friend. 

Which every hour his couriers bring. 

Love is and was my King and Lord, 
And will be, tho' as yet I keep 
Within his court on earth, and sleep 

Encompass'd by his faithful guard, 

And hear at times a sentinel 

Who moves about from place to place, 
And whispers to the worlds of space. 

In the deep night, that all is well. 



cxxx 

Thy voice is on the rolling air ; 

I hear thee where the waters run; 

Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in the setting thou art fair. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 309 

What art thou then ? I cannot guess ; 
But tho' I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee some diffusive power, 

I do not therefore love thee less : 



My love involves the love before ; 

My love is vaster passion now ; 10 

Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou, 

I seem to love thee more and more. 

Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; 

I have thee still, and I rejoice ; 

I prosper, circled with thy voice; 15 

I shall not lose thee tho' I die. 



CXXXI 

O living will that shalt endure 

When all that seems shall suffer shock, 

Rise in the spiritual rock, 
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure. 

That we may lift from out of dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 
A cry above the conquer'd years 

To one that with us works, and trust, 

With faith that comes of self-control, 

The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul. 



3IO OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

PREFATORY POEM TO MY BROTHER'S SONNETS 

Midnight, June 30, 1879 



Midnight — in no midsummer tune 
The breakers lash the shores : 
The cuckoo of a joyless June 
Is calling out of doors : 

And thou hast vanish'd from thine own 
To that which looks like rest, 
True brother, only to be known 
By those who love thee best. 



Midnight — and joyless June gone by, 
And from the deluged park 
The cuckoo of a worse July 
Is calling thro' the dark : 

But thou art silent underground, 
And o'er thee streams the rain, 
True poet, surely to be found 
When Truth is found again. 

Ill 

And, now to these unsummer'd skies 
The summer bird is still. 
Far off a phantom cuckoo cries 
From out a phantom hill ; 



VASTNESS 311 

And thro' this midnight breaks the sun 
Of sixty years away, 
The Hght of days when hfe begun, 
The days that seem to-day, 

When all my griefs were shared with thee, 25 

As all my hopes were thine — 

As all thou wert was one with me, 

May all thou art be mine ! 



VASTNESS 



Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish'd 
face, 

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a van- 
ish'd race. 

II 
Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth's pale history 

runs, — 
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million 

million of suns? 

Ill 
Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence 5 

mourn'd by the Wise, 
Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of 

lies upon lies ; 

IV 

Stately purposes, valour in battle, glorious annals of army and 

fleet, 
Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets 

of victory, groans of defeat ; 



312 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

V 

Innocence seethed in her mother's milk, and Charity setting 

the martyr aflame ; 
Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks lo 

not to ruin a realm in her name. 

VI 

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that 

darken the schools ; 
Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow'd up by her 

vassal legion of fools ; 

VII 

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her spice and her vint- 
age, her silk and her corn ; 

Desolate offing, sailorless harbours, famishing populace, wharves 
forlorn ; 

VIII 

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; gloom of the even- 15 

ing, Life at a close ; 
Pleasure who flaunts on her wide down-way with her flying robe 

and her poison'd rose ; 

IX 

Pain, that has crawl'd from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm 

which writhes all day, and at night 
Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back 

to the curse of the light ; 

X 

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots ; honest Poverty, 

bare to the bone ; 
Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty ; Flattery gilding the rift in 20 

a throne ; 



VASTNESS 313 

XI 

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge 

to Time and to Fate ; 
Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurel'd 

graves of the Great ; 

XII 

Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for 

aught that has been. 
Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, 

golden mean ; 

XIII 

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the 25 

village spire ; 
Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are 

snapt in a moment of fire ; 

XIV 

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the 

doing it, flesh without mind ; 
He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in 

the love of his kind ; 

XV 

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these 

old revolutions of earth ; 
All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — 30 

what is all of it worth ? 

XVI 

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices 

of prayer ? 
All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all 

that is fair? 



314 OF THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

XVII 

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse- 
coffins at last, 

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of 
a meaningless Past? 

XVIII 

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's 35 
anger of bees in their hive ? — 

Peace, let it be ! for I loved him, and love him for ever : the 
dead are not dead but alive. 



CROSSING THE BAR 

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea. 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 5 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark ! 10 

And may there be no sadness of farewell, 

When I embark ; 

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 15 

When I have crost the bar. 



NOTES 



CLARIBEL: A MELODY (Page 3) 

This little piece of verbal music was first printed in Poems, Chiefly 
Lyrical (1830), and since that time has stood on the first page of every 
edition of Tennyson's complete works. As originally arranged (1830- 
1842), it was not divided into strophes. The poem shows one of the 
distinctive traits of Tennyson's early art, — the delicate and almost 
dainty care with which his poems were finished. The sub-title explains 
and limits the artist's purpose. Of course the lasting beauty of the 
melody depends upon the truth with which it expresses the feelings 
of a lover listening to the voices of Nature beside the grave of his 
beloved. 

Philip Gilbert Hamerton makes an interesting observation on the dif- 
ficulty which any one not speaking English as his mother-tongue would 
have in appreciating " Claribel." ( The Intellectual Life, pt. iii, ch. 3.) 
Its evanescent charm would be lost in translation. 

The metre is an irregular iambic of three stresses, the lines arranged 
in two strophes which are connected by the burthen, " Where Claribel 
low-lieth." The first stress in 1. 3, the second and third stresses in 1. 13, 
are transposed ; there is a hovering accent on the first word of 1. 5 and 
the last word of 1. 12; and there are two light syllables before the first 
stress in 11. 4, 6, 7, making anapaestic bars. There are three masculine 
rhymes (2-6-7 ! 3-5 ; 10-12-14), and four feminine rhymes (1-4-8-20- 
21; 9-11-13; 15-16-18; 17-19). The unstressed syllable of the femi- 
nine rhymes is the same throughout. The refrain from the first line, 
repeated at the close of the first and second strophes, suggests the 
form of a rondeau. 

3 1. Claribel : Spenser tells the story of Claribel's death in The 
Faerie Queene, ii, 4, st. 26-29. Cf. The Tempest^ ii, i, 70, "The king's 
fair daughter Claribel." 

3»5 



3l6 NOTES 

3 5. Thick-leaved : This and indeed all the other compound 
words were printed in 1830 and 1833 as one word, without the hyphen, 
to which Tennyson said he had " an absurd antipathy." {Mem., I, 50.) 

3 11. In 1830: At noon the bee low-htmimeth. 

3 15. Lintwhite : linnet. A song in the volume of 1830 began — 

The lintwhite and the throstlecock 
Have voices sweet and clear. 

3 16, 17. Mavis ; throstle : two common names for the thrush. 
Perhaps the former is used for the song-thrush, the latter for the 
missel-thrush. 

3 17. Callow. \%Tp-\%^\\ fledgli7ig. C^//i7w was transferred from 
the original version of " Mariana in the South " : " She heard the callow 
nestling lisp." 

3 19. Runnel: little stream. Cf. "Mariana in the South" (1833), 
"Brimful meadow-runnels crisp," and "Lover's Tale," ii, 48, 100. 
Crispeth: a favorite word with Tennyson in his early poems for the 
description of waves. It occurs in at least eleven other instances. 



SONG (Page 4) 

This song of autumnal melancholy was made by Tennyson on the 

lawn of the Somersby rectory, and is a true and faithful picture of the 

garden there. See the Mem., I, 3: — "Beyond the path, bounding 

the green sward to the south, ran in the old days a deep border of 

lilies and roses, backed by hollyhocks and sunflowers. Beyond that 

was 

' A garden bower'd close 

With plaited alleys of the trailing rose,' etc." 

Ode to Aleiiiory, 105 ff. 
Published in 1830. 

The metre is slow and sad. There are two stanzas of eight lines, 
in a cadence that tends toward the anapaestic. The length of the lines 
ranges from one to four stresses. Following the stanza is a refrain- 
quatrain of four-stress lines, with alternate feminine rhymes. The beat 
falls " heavily " on the first syllable of each line of this refrain. 

4 9. Sunflower : Cf. In Mem., ci, lamenting the departure from 
Somersby in 1837: — 

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair, 

Ray round with flames her disk of seed. 



THE THROSTLE 317 



THE THROSTLE (Page 5) 

For the date see Mem., II, 353 : — " Towards the end of this month 
[February 1889, when Tennyson was recovermg from a severe attack 
of rheumatic gout] he sat in his kitchen-garden summer-house, listening 
attentively to the different notes of the thrush, and finishing his song 
of ' The Throstle ' which had been begun in the same garden [at Far- 
ringford] years ago." In May a few copies were struck off in leaflet 
form by the Macmillans to secure copyright ; on September 29 it was 
published in The New York World ; it appeared in the October number 
of The New Review ; finally, in December, it was given a place in 
Demeter, and Other Poems. " The Throstle " is a miracle of freshness 
wrought by the immortal spring in Tennyson's heart, in very spite of 
pain and age. (See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 294.) The " throstle " 
is the missel-tjjrush, of which Gilbert White says, "The people of 
Hampshire and Sussex call it the storm-cock because it sings early in 
the spring in blowing showery weather." {Natural History of Selborne, 
" Letters to Pennant," xxxix.) 

The cadences of the bird-song are closely imitated by the rapid 
repetition of certain sounds. The rhythm is irregular, but prevailingly 
dactylic. The Unes have alternately four and three stresses. The 
rhymes are alternate in the first and third quatrains, interwoven in 
the second and fourth. Many of them are feminine. L. 13 has an 
internal as well as a terminal rhyme. 

5 13. The New Review has " Here again, here, here, happy year." 
This is probably a misprint, as the World version shows the three con- 
secutive here^s. 



FAR— FAR — AWAY (Page 5) 

Written some time before August 1888, for in that month Tennyson 
repeated the poem " without hesitating for a moment." {Mem., II, 346.) 
Published in the Demeter volume of 1889. The emotion so delicately 
expressed is the attraction of the distant — in landscape, in sound, in 
the antenatal past. (See Tennyson's remarks to Knowles, The Nine- 
teenth CentJiry, XXXIII, 170.) It is when deahng with these subtle and 
elusive feelings that Tennyson achieves his most characteristic lyrical 
triumphs ; then, as Poe said in The Poetic Principle, " the poetical 
excitement which he induces is the most ethereal, — in other words, 



3i8 NOTES 

the most elevating and the most pure." See The Poetry of Tennyson, 
p. 297. Cf. " The Ancient Sage," 226. 

The metre is the familiar heroic couplet, followed and modified by 
a refrain. Alliteration, open and veiled, was never more exquisitely 
handled. 

5 5. " Distant bells always charmed him with their ' lin-lan-lone,' 
and, when heard over the sea or a lake, he was never tired of listening 
to them." {Mem., II, 366.) Cf. Mistral, Nerto, chant v (1884): — 

' Et balalan ! et balalin ! 
On entend au lointain les cloches." 

The imitative words are the same in the Proven9al as in this French 
translation. 

6 8. When a boy : From earliest childhood, Tennyson tells us, "the 
words 'far, far away ' had always a strange charm for him." {Mem., 1, 11.) 

6 11. Fair dawn, etc.: See note on "The Ancient Sage," 216 ff. 
(p. 448). 

"MOVE EASTWARD, HAPPY EARTH" (Page 6) 

Published in 1842. Mr. Stephen Gwynn {Tennyson: A Critical 
Study, p. 115) speaks of "the skill with which Tennyson used his 
knowledge to realize physically in our minds things that to most of us 
are only abstract." 

The metre is iambic four-stress verse, in three quatrains, of which 
the first and last have interwoven rhymes, and the second has close 
rhymes (the In Mcmoriam stanza). The first and second quatrains are 
bound into one stave by a common rhyme. 

6 3. Fringes of the faded eve : streaks of cloud in the dying light. 

6 6. Thy silver sister-world : Venus as the morning star. 

6 9. Smoothly: From 1842 to 1853 lightly was the word here; 
Tennyson doubtless changed it to avoid the awkward repetition of light 
in the next line. 

THE SNOWDROP (Page 7) 

Perhaps the " February" is that of 1S89. PubUshed in the Demeter 
volume of that year. A trifle light as air, it is buoyant with the youth- 
fulness of Tennyson's old age. 

The measure is three-stress trochaic. LI. 3-5 and 6-7 are rhymed ; 
the rest are unrhymed, but the first two lines are identical with the last 
two. 



A FAREWELL 319 

A FAREWELL (Page 7) 

Published in 1842, and, if we may judge from internal evidence, 
written in 1837, when the Tennysons moved from Somersby to High 
Beech in Epping Forest. Cf. In Mem., c-ciii. The stream which it 
celebrates took possession of Tennyson's imagination, haunted his 
memory, and supplied him with more poetical material than any other 
natural object. (Among other references may be mentioned "Ode to 
Memory," 58-63; In Mem., Ixxix, 9-10; xcv, 7; xcix, 5-8; c, 13-16; 
ci, 9-16; " By a Brook," in the Mem., I, 55. It suppUed details also for 
" The May Queen," " The Miller's Daughter," " The Brook," " Geraint 
and Enid, " Northern Farmer, New Style," and probably Maud.) Origi- 
nating in the springs just above Tetford, it runs eastward below the vil- 
lage of Somersby, and skirts the rectory garden — a small, swift "beck " 
with high banks and a sandy bottom. Every variety of verdure and foli- 
age may be found in its neighbourhood. It winds its way past many a 
little town, " a rivulet, then a river," draining a large district, and finally 
issuing into the German Ocean at Gibraltar Point, where it forms Wain- 
fleet Haven. (Drummond Rawnsley in Memories of the Tennysons, 
pp. 186 ff. ; Mem., I, 3 ; J. C, Walters, In Tennyson Land, p. 72.) 

The quatrain has alternating four- and three-stress iambic lines, with 
interwoven rhymes and an internal or Leonine rhyme in the third line. 
A faulty double rhyme, ever — deliver, etc., is a minor defect. The same 
rhymes are kept throughout, the fourth line of the quatrain is a constant 
refrain, and the third changes slightly but subtly. The whole makes a 
single, strong impression. 

7 10. Aspen shiver: Cf. Lady of Shalott, 10, "aspens quiver," 
where shiver was the reading of 1833. It is hardly necessary to point 
out the singular aptness of the verb. 

7 13. Thousand: replaced hundred, the 1842 reading. A hundred 
suns would not be long to a brook that goes on for ever. 

SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS (Page 8) 

The songs between the cantos of The Princess were added in the 
third edition, 1850. " Tears, idle tears," " The Swallow's Message," the 
" Serenade," and " A Small Sweet Idyl " appeared in the first edition, 
1847. Of the intercalaiy songs Tennyson wrote in 1882 : " I may tell you 
that the songs were not an afterthought. Before the first edition came 
out I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the 
separate divisions of the poem ; again, I thought, the poem will explain 



320 NOTES 

itself ; but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the 
heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted 
them." (Letter to S. E. Dawson, published in his Study of the Princess, 
2d edition.) Tennyson began serious work on The Princess in the 
summer of 1845, and wrote it mostly in Lincoln's Inn Fields. {Mem., I, 
203, 247.) He read some of the songs to Palgrave on April 2, 1849. 
{Mem., II, 486.) 

The Little Grave (Page 8) 

The theme of this song is that of the charming old English lyric by 
Richard Edwards (i 523-1 566), " Amantium Irae Amoris Redintegratio 
Est." See Terence, Andria, 555. 

The metre is formed from the familiar iambic quatrain of alternat- 
ing four- and three-stress verses (" common metre," derived from the 
\.2,\vlv Septenarius. GnxanxexQ, Haftdbook of Poetics, ■^. i2>2). The vari- 
ation consists in repeating the third line in the first and last quatrains, 
and knitting the song together with a single rhyme and a refrain. 

8 4. Inserted in 1851. 

8 6-9. Present in the third edition (1850), and thereafter suppressed 
until 1865. The song is better without this quatrain. 

8 13. Inserted in 1851. 

^^ Sweet and low'''' (Page 8) 

Hallam Tennyson says {Mem., I, 255) : " Two versions of ' Sweet and 
low ' were made, and were sent to my mother to choose which should 
be published. She chose the published one in preference to that 
which follows, because it seemed to her more song-like." 

Bright is the moon on the deep. 
Bright are the cliffs in her beam, 

Sleep, my little one, sleep! 
Look he smiles, and opens his hands. 
He sees his father in distant lands. 
And kisses him there in a dream, 
Sleep, sleep. 

Father is over the deep. 
Father will come to thee soon, 
Sleep, my pretty one, sleep ! 
Father will come to his babe in the nest, 
Silver sails all out of the West, 
Under the silver moon, 
Sleep, sleep! 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 321 

This lullaby, like " The Bugle Song," is composed of a succession of 
musical phrases, difficult and unprofitable to analyze. The general 
movement is trochaic, lightly and softly rocking ; that of " The Bugle 
Song " is iambic, stronger and more stately. 

8 6. Dying in 1851 replaced ^r^//z«^. 



The Bugle Song (Page 9) 

This song is one of the most perfect specimens of Tennyson's lyrical 
art, and was a favourite with him for reading aloud. It was suggested 
by hearing the echoes of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney, which 
Tennyson visited in 1842 and 1848, and is true in local colour. {Mem., 
I, 217, 253, 292.) The theme, put in plain prose, is the reciprocal influ- 
ence of love on two fond hearts, an influence which is immortal and 
ever-increasing, while the echoes of Nature die away. Tom Moore's 
" Echoes " has a similar subject. 

9 1. Castle walls : Ross Castle on Ross Island in the Lower Lake. 
The most famous echo is from the Eagle's Nest in the Upper Lake. 
About this mountain and the neighbouring peaks (which are, of course, 
not literally " snowy summits ") cluster innumerable tales of legendary 
heroes. 

9 4. Cataract : Probably the Tore Cascade, the great tributary to 
the Middle Lake, is meant, though there are many smaller waterfalls. 

9 9. Scar (or scaur) : bare, isolated rock. 

9 10. The horns of Elfland : Cf. " Guinevere," 246, 247. 



The Battle (Page id) 

A song of courage inspired by domestic love. The metre is the 
ordinary ballad-verse of four stresses, with iambic rhythm and inter- 
woven rhyme. Another version was printed in the Selection of 1865: — 

Lady, let the rolling drums 
Beat to battle where thy warrior stands: 
Now thy face across his fancy comes, 

And gives the battle to his hands. 

Lady, let the trumpets blow, 
Clasp thy little babes about thy knee: 
Now their warrior father meets the foe, 

And strikes him dead for thine and thee. 



322 NOTES 

10 1, 2. Changed in 1851 from 

When all among the thundering drums 
Thy soldier in the battle stands, 

10 8. Changed in 1851 from 

Strikes him dead for them and thee! 
Tara ta tantara ! 

'^ Sweet my child, I live for thee " (Page 10) 

A song of life made worth living by the duty of motherhood. Its 
literary history carries us back to the Icelandic Gu&runar-kvi&a, or 
Tale of Gudrun, which Tennyson may have seen, with an English 
translation, in Conybeare's Anglo-Saxon Poetry, pp. xliii ff. " Gudrun 
was nigh to death, as she sat sorrowing over Sigurd. She made no 
loud cry, nor wrung her hands, nor wept as other women use. The 
wise men came and tried to soothe her heavy heart. Nevertheless 
Gudrun could not weep, she was so oppressed, her heart was like to 
break. . . . Then spake Goldrand, Guiki's daughter: 'Thou knowest 
not . . . how to comfort the young wife.' She bade them uncover the 
king's body, and swept the sheet from off Sigurd, casting it to the ground 
before his wife's knees. ' Look on thy love, lay thy mouth to his lips 
as if thou wert clasping thy living lord.' Gudrun cast one look upon 
him, she saw the king's hair dripping with blood, his keen eyes dead, 
his breast scored by the sword. Then she fell upon the pillow, with 
loosened hair and reddened cheek ; her tears trickled like rain-drops 
down to her knees." (Translation of Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus 
Poeticum Boreale, I, 323 ff.) 

Sir Walter Scott changed the outcome, and Tennyson follows Scott. 
See The Lay of the Last Minstrel, I, st. 9 : — 

" O'er her warrior's bloody bier 
The Ladye dropp'd nor flower nor tear ! 
Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain. 

Had lock'd the source of softer woe ; 
And burning pride, and high disdain, 

Forbade the rising tear to flow, 
Until, amid his sorrowing clan, * 

Her son lisp'd from the nurse's knee — 
'And if I live to be a man. 

My father's death revenged shall be ! ' 
Then fast the mother's tears did seek 
To dew the infant's kindling cheek." 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 323 

The metre is the same as that of the preceding song, except that the 
accent is trochaic, and so more intense. 

Another version of the song was published in the Selection of 

Home they brought him slain with spears. 

They brought him home at even-fall ; 
All alone she sits and hears 

Echoes in his empty hall, 

Sounding on the morrow. 

The Sun peep'd in from open field, 

The boy began to leap and prance. 

Rode upon his father's lance, 
Beat upon his father's shield, 

" Oh hush, my joy, my sorrow." 

10 15. Like summer tempest : The simile seems taken from the 
Gudrun story. 

"■Ask uic no more^' (Page ii) 

A song of the slow yielding of reluctant love. It is written in five- 
stress iambic verse, arranged in quatrains with close rhyme, as in Milton's 
"Psalm VI." The first four words are repeated as a burthen at the 
close of each stanza. This refrain may have been caught from Carew's 
exquisite poem, " Ask me no more where Jove bestows." A slow and 
simple movement is imparted by the large proportion of monosyllables. 

11 2, 3. This bit of description, like most of Tennyson's, was drawn 
with his eye on the object, as he told Palgrave. {Mem., II, 486.) Cf. the 
imagery in Shelley's " Love's Philosophy." 

11 12. Cf. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 772 : " And all in vain 
you strive against the stream." 

^'- Tears, idle tears''' (Page ii) 

The germ of this song is perhaps a fragment entitled " No More," 
written in 1826 and published in The Gefn, 1831 : — 

Oh sad No More! Oh sweet No More.' 
Oh strange No More .' 

By a mossed brookbank on a stone 

I smelt a wildweed-flower alone ; 

There was a ringing in my ears. 

And both my eyes gushed out with tears. 
Surely all pleasant things had gone before, 
Lowburied fathomdeep beneath with thee, No More ! 



324 NOTES 

Tennyson said to James Knowles of the poem : " It is in a way like 
St. Paul's 'groanings which cannot be uttered.' It was written at 
Tintem when the woods were all yellowing with autumn seen through 
the ruined windows." {N'ineteenth Century, January 1893.) He told his 
son that it expressed " the passion of the past [Cf. " The Ancient Sage," 
219], the abiding in the present" ; and that Charles Turner's sonnet of 
" Time and Twilight " [with Wordsworth's line, " Whose dwelling is 
the light of setting suns," from a poem also made near Tintern Abbey] 
" had the same sort of mystic, ddmonisch feeling." {Mem., I, 253, II, 73.) 
The lack of rhyme in this and the three following poems is hardly 
observed in the profusion of alliterative sounds, the modulation of 
vowels, and the repetition of words. This lack is further obscured by 
the arrangement of the lines in stanzas (except in " A Small Sweet 
Idyl ") and by the refrain words in " Tears, idle tears " and the 
" Serenade." The blank-verse lyric (of which there are eight examples 
in Tennyson) is one of his chief contributions to the art of English poetry. 
Songs without rhyme had often been made before (e.g., by Sidney, 
Campion, Collins, Southey, Shelley, and Lamb), but Tennyson was the 
first successfully to adapt our " iambic hcentiate " to a lyrical mood. 
See J. A. Symonds, Blank Verse, p. 68. 

11 1. Idle tears : Cf. Virgil's " lacrimae inanes " {Aen., iv, 449), and 
"Miller's Daughter," 211, "Eyes with idle tears are wet." 

12 14. Cf. Leigh Hunt, Hero and Leander (1819), ii, 103-104: — 

" And when the casement, at the dawn of light, 
Began to show a square of ghastly white." 

The Swallow'' s Message (Page 12) 

The song of the northern lover to the swallow, as it speeds south- 
ward in the autumn to the home of his heart. It was first composed 
in rhyme. {Mem., II, 74.) The stanzas have three lines each, after the 
model perhaps of the goatherd's serenade in Theocritus, iii. There are 
imitative effects in the use of extra-syllables ; see 11. 2, 23, and especially 7, 
with its " wing-beating " rhyme and rhythm. Cf. Swinburne's " Itylus." 

12 7 ff. Cf. Theocritus, iii, 12-14; xi, 54-57. 

12 11, 12. Cf. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis^ 1185: 

" Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest ; j 

My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night." ' 

12 14, 15. The ash is very late to get into leaf. Cf. " Gardener's 
Daughter," 28. 



SONGS FROM THE PRINCESS 325 

Serenade (Page 13) 

A garden song, expressed in a succession of images which are 
touched with the white and gold of moonUght. Indeed, romantic 
passion is almost lost in the studied beauty of words and figures. 

13 7. Danae : the Argive princess whom Zeus visited in the form 
of a golden shower. 

13 10. Furrow : Apollonius Rhodius uses 6X/c6s to describe a meteor 
{Argonautica, iv, 296), and Virgil sulcus in the same way {Aen., ii, 697). 
Cf. " Love and Duty," 97, and The Princess, iii, 2. 



A Small Sweet Idyl (Page 14) 

This is imitated from the song of the Cyclops to Galatea in Theoc- 
ritus, xi, especially 11. 42-49, 60-66. (See the lovely translation by 
Stedman in Victorian Poets, p. 228.) It was written during a visit to 
Switzerland, in August 1846, chiefly at Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. 
{Mem., I, 252.) The theme is Love calling maidenhood from the lonely 
life of contemplation on the heights to the familiar and friendly life in 
the valley 'of human homes. For "simple rhythm and vowel music" 
Tennyson considered it " as amongst his most successful work." 
Though the regularity of syllable and stress is almost unbroken until 
1. 27, the caesural pause is subtly varied, and so supplies harmony. 
The last three lines are marvels of onomatopoeia. Analysis reveals 
that the effect of rippUng water in 1. 29 is due to the accumulation of 
short vowels, liquid consonants, and extra-syllables, and that the wood- 
doves' note (30) and the humming of the bees (31) are preserved in the 
many w's and the soft o's and «'s. (See Sidney Lanier, The Science of 
English Verse, p. 308, and Wallace's edition of The Princess.) 

14 2. What pleasure : Cf. Theocritus, xi, 60-63. 

14 6. Spire : pinnacle of rock. 

14 12. Foxlike in the vine : Cf. Song of Solomon, ii, 15, " Take us 
the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines"; or Theocritus, i, 48, 
49, " Round him two she-foxes are skulking, and one goes along the 
vine-rows to devour the ripe grapes." 

14 13. Death : Surely the more poetical interpretation is to refer 
this to the deathhke pallor of the snowy summits in the gray of early 
dawn, rather than to the absence of all life there. Morning : Cf. 
Hamlet, i, i, 166, 167. Silver horns : Spelled with capitals in 1847. 
The Silberhorn is a spur of the Jungfrau (of which a glorious view is 



326 NOTES 

obtained at Lauterbrunnen), " horn " being the regular name for an 
Alpine peak. As Woodberry notes, silver is the colour at the first 
break of light. 

14 15. Firths of ice : glaciers. The description which follows per- 
haps applies best to the Lower Grindelwald Glacier with its discharge 
of the Liitschine. 

14 16. Furrow-cloven : split by crevasses. 

14 17. Dusky doors: the piled-up refuse at the foot of the glacier 
through which the stream emerges. 

14 20, 21. Leave the monstrous ledges, etc. : Cf. Theocritus, xi, 43, 
'* Leave the green sea to stretch itself to shore." 

14 22. Water-smoke : The Staubbach (" Dust-brook ") at Lauter- 
brunnen, for example, in its leap of 980 feet becomes a smoky veil of 
spray. Cf. " The Lotos-Eaters," 8. 

14 23. It is unusual to describe a natural phenomenon by a moral 
simile. Shelley is the only modern poet who does it frequently. 

14 25. Azure pillars of the hearth : high straight columns of blue 
smoke. 

14 27. Sweet : The repetition is like Theocritus, viii, 76, 78. Cf. 
also, i, I, 7. 

14 29. Rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn : Cf. Virgil, Geor., iv, 19, 
" tenuis fugiens per gramina rivus." 

14 30. This is finer than Virgil's " Nee gemere aeria cessabit turtur 
ab ulmo." (EcL, i, 59.) 



SONGS FROM OTHER POEMS 

THE SONG OF THE BROOK (PAGE 1 5) 

(From The Brook) 

Included in the Maud volume of 1855. The singer of the song is 
a " brook of the imagination," though it bears a general family resem- 
blance to the Somersby stream. (Church, The Laureate's Country, 
p. 17.) Tennyson may have taken his hint from Goethe's "Das 
Bachlein " : — 

•' Du Bachlein silberhell und klar, 
Du eilst voriibsr immerdar, 
Am Ufer steh' ich, sinn' und sinn' : 
Wo kommst du her ? Wo gehst du bin ? 



. THE SONG OF THE BROOK 327 

* Ich komm' aus dunkler Felsen Schoos ; 
Mein Lauf geht iiber Blum' und Moos; 
Auf meinem Spiegel schwebt so mild 
Des blauen Himmels freundlich Bild'"; 

or from Burns's " Halloween," st. 25 : — 

" Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, 

As thro' the glen it wimpl't; 
Whyles round a rocky scar it strays ; 

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; 
Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, 

Wi' bickering, dancing dazzle ; 
Whyles cookit underneath the braes 

Below the spreading hazel." 

This is in the same metre as " The Song of the Brook," viz., iambic 
quatrains of alternating four- and three-stress lines, with intei-woven 
rhyme, and feminine rhymes in the second and fourth lines. L. 25 has 
also a Leonine rhyme. " River " — " ever " is an approximate rhyme that 
Tennyson often uses. One quatrain is repeated (with variation in its 
first line), after every three or four, as a refrain. The playful lightness 
of the measure, brought into sharp relief by the blank verse of the Idyl, 
and the skilful management of the difficult double rhymes make the 
poem metrically noteworthy. 

15 ]. Coot: the bald coot {Fulica atra), a web-footed bird which 
dwells by the banks of lakes and streams. Cf. In Mem., ci, 14. 

15 4. Bicker : The New English Dictionary cites this line under 
the meaning " to make a brawling noise " ; but it is better to take it as 
" flicker," or " flash," as in " Geraint and Enid," 449 : — 

She saw 
Dust, and the points of lances bicker in it. 

As applied to streams, cf. the stanza from Burns quoted above ; 
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, i, st. 3 (" Glittering streamlets . . . 
bickered through the sunny glade "), and " Winter," 725 ; and the song 
in Scott's Mo7tastery, ch. ix (" At the crook of the glen. Where bickers 
the burnie"). 

15 7. Thorps: hamlets. One of the early English words which 
Tennyson was fond of employing. Cf. Chaucer, Clerkes Tale, 199: 
" Ther stood a throp, of site delitable " ; and Browning's " A Gram- 
marian's Funeral" (1855), 29. 

15 9. Philip : a character in the Idyl. 



328 NOTES 

15 11, 12. Cf. Horace, Ep., i, 2^, 43 : — 

" Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis ; at ille 
Labitur et labetur, in omne volubilis aevum." 

Collins compares also the Italian sundial inscription : — 

" lo vade e vengo ogni giorno 
Ma tu andrai senza ritorno." 

And see Wordsworth's " The Fountain," st. 6. 

15 20. Willow-weed : the Great Hairy Willow-herb {Epilobmm 
hirsutuni), a weed with large magenta flowers. Cf. The Profuise of 
May, ii, 259. 

16 31. Waterbreak : ripple ; a Wordsworthian word. Cf. " The 
unremitting voice of nightly streams," 17, — "The tinkling knell of 
water-breaks"; also the sonnet "Brook! whose society the Poet 
seeks." 

16 38. Covers : woodland haunts. 



CRADLE-SONG (PAGE 1 7) 
(From Sea Dreams) 

"Sea Dreams" w^as written in 1858 {Mem., I, 429), published in 
Macmillaii's Magazine, January i860, and reprinted in Enoch Arden, 
and Other Poems, 1864. 

This and the songs which follow belong to that light and free kind 
of lyrical poetry, in which it is foolish to try to apply strict metrical 
laws drawn from classical models. (Gummere, Poetics, pp. 168, 169.) 
What is said about them here is general and approximate. The 
"Cradle-Song" is in four-stress trochaic verse, with the rhyme and 
rhythm of the first stanza repeated in the second. 



MOTHER-SONG (PAGE 1 8) 

(From Rom7icy''s Remorse) 

This lullaby was written by Tennyson in 1889, when he had turned 
eighty, partly for Hallam Tennyson's son, Lionel, born in that year. 
{Mem., I, 371.) It was first published in Demeter, and Other Poems 
(1889). See The Poetry of Tennysoti, p. 296. The movement is dac- 
tylic, with four stresses to the line, stanzas rhyming in triplets, and a sort 
of " bob-wheel " at the end. 



ENID'S SONG 329 

18 11. White heather: Mr. W. Gordon McCabe visited Tennyson 
in 1889. "After we had shaken hands, he gave me a bit of white 
heather in bloom, which I had noticed he was holding in his hand. 
' I found today in my walk, and have brought home for you, what is 
not found here in the south of England once in ten years — white 
heather in bloom. It means good luck, and so I 'm going to give it to 
you.'" {The Century Magazine, March 1902.) 



ENID'S SONG (Page 18) 

(From The Marriage of Geraint) 

Written in 1856. For the odd story of its origin see Mem., I, 414. 
Published in Idylls of the King, 1859. Fortune's wheel has long been 
such familiar stock in literature that it is useless to look for a single 
source of suggestion. Tennyson's mood had been partially anticipated 
in expression by Dante {Inf., xv, 92-96), by Shakespeare (3 Henry VI, 
iv, 3, 46), and by Boileau {Epitre v, near the end): — 

" Qu' \ son gre desormais la fortune me joue ; 
On me verra dormir au branle de sa roue." 

This, like most of the songs in the Idylls, is in five-stress iambic 
verse, arranged in three-line stanzas. The last lines of all the stanzas 
rhyme together, and the last stanza repeats the rhyme of the first ; thus 
the song is closely interlaced. It " seems intended to convey a sug- 
gestion or reminiscence of the troubadour rondels and villanelles." 
(Littledale, Essays on the Idylls, p. 131.) 

18 7, 8. This is like Horatio's proud indifference to fortune. 
{Hamlet, iii, 2, 70 ff.) 

18 9. The crystalhzed expression of Tennyson's beUef in the 
freedom of the will. Cf. In Mem., cxxxi. He speaks a little less 
confidently in " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 277. 



VIVIEN'S SONG (Page 19) 

(From Merlin and Vivien) 

Tennyson wrote " Merhn and Vivien," as it was ultimately called, in 
February and March 1856. It was published in Idylls of the King, 
1859. This love song of the wicked heroine is a sweet and tender 
rhyme, and contains one of Tennyson's most quotable phrases. Vivien 



330 NOTES 

says that she 'heard the great Sir Lancelot smg it once.' Cf. The 
Foresters, ii, 2, 29-31 : — 

To mistrust the girl you say you love 

Is to mistrust your own love for your girl ! 

How should you love if you mistrust your love ? 

The metre is the same as that of the preceding poem save that there 
is a refrain word, " all." 

19 19. All in all: This Biblical phrase (i Cor., xv, 28) becomes a 
characteristic of Tennyson's later diction. 

ELAINE'S SONG (PAGE 1 9) 

(From Lancelot and Elaine) 

" Lancelot and Elaine," at first entitled " Elaine," was begun in July 
1858, and published in Idylls of the Ki7ig, 1859. Elaine makes this song 
when she knows that her love for the knight is hopeless, and calls it 
" The Song of Love and Death." The interplay of words is Shake- 
spearean, and is justified by the depth of the emotion. The general 
structure is the same as in the songs of Enid and Vivien, but the 
repetitions and balancings within the stanzas are more frequent and 
skilful. 

MILKING-SONG (PAGE 2o) 

(From Qiicen Mary) 

Queeji Mary was written in 1874 and 1875, and published in the latter 
year. The song is perfectly regular in the sense that the number of 
Hght and heavy syllables is the same in each stanza (except that one 
light syllable is omitted in the first line of the last stanza, being com- 
pensated by the pause after " Come "). The general rhythm is trochaic. 
Almost the same rhymes are held throughout ; and the fourth and sev- 
enth lines form a double burthen. But the arrangement of lines and 
accents cannot be brought under strict rules without forcing. (Cf. 11. 3, 7.) 

20 6. Kingcups: buttercups. 

THE QUEEN'S SONG (PAGE 2l) 

(From Queen Mary) 

Sung by the Queen when she learns that ' her people hate her as her 
husband hates her.' It is written in trochaic triplets of seven stresses 
to each Une (except the first, which has only six), followed by a short 
refrain. The rhymes are feminine, and one of them is approximate. 



DUET OF HENRY AND ROSAMUND 331 

DUET OF HENRY AND ROSAMUND (PAGE 2l) 
(From Becket) 

Becket was begun in December 1876, and published in 1884. The 
duet is sung by the lovers in the bower at the centre of the maze which 
King Henry II had built to protect Rosamund. See on " A Dream of 
Fair Women," 251. 

The metre is six-stress dactylic, but the omission of the final light 
syllable makes the effect very different from the ordinary " English hex- 
ameter." Note the repetition of 1. 5 in 1. 10, which seems to divide the 
song into two stanzas with a refrain. 

ODE TO MEMORY (Page 22) 

Published in the volume of 1S30, with the heading "Written very 

Early in Life," instead of "Addressed to ." This would suggest 

that the lines w^ere already composed when Poems by Two Brothers 
came out (1827). The "Ode" was rightly thought by Tennyson to be 
" one of the best among his very early and peculiarly concentrated 
Nature-poems." {Mem., I, 3.) The atmosphere is suffused with the 
hope and joy of youth, and familiar scenes are depicted with fidelity 
and tenderness. Much of the thought is evolved through intricate 
tropes and allegory. 

The poem is an irregular ode of the type introduced by Cowley and 
much used by the Romantic School. The length of lines, the arrange- 
ment of rhymes, etc., are supposed to be free from all restraint save an 
inner law of rhythmic emotion. As a whole, the changes here seem 
arbitrary and fantastic, rather than justified by well-defined lyrical 
impulses. See Coleridge's strictures on Tennyson as a metrist. 
{Table Talk, April 24, 1833.) The cadence is generally iambic, and 
the number of stresses to the line ranges from two to six. As 1. 41 has 
no rhyme, it is perhaps to be read as a single line with the succeeding 
one, having in all eight stresses. Three lines, twice repeated, form as 
it were a refrain. There are five approximate rhymes: 2-3, 19-20, 
21-23, 58-60, 109-110; one lame rhyme, 35-38-39, one assonant rhyme, 
105-106, and one echo-rhyme, 98-100. 

22 14. Dew-impearled : Collins compares Drayton, Idea, Sonnet 
liii : " Amongst the dainty dew-impearled flowers." 

22 20. Black earth : stock Homeric phrase. (See e.g., //. ii, 699.) 

23 24 ff. First impressions are the deepest and the last to fade. 
23 32. Cope : arched heaven. 



332 NOTES 

23 33. Half-attain'd futurity: perhaps, the future towards which 
the boy has come part way. 

23 35. Stars which tremble : Cf. " On a Mourner," 28, " trembUng 
stars." 

23 38. She : " mfant Hope " (1. 30). 

23 39. Eyes: the "stars" of 1. 35. " Eyej- so" and " heaven'j- 
jpheres " furnish the remarkable instance of two hisses in close vicinity. 

23 40-42. Refer to the survival in childhood of memories of a 
preexistence. With slight changes they occur also in " Timbuctoo," 
212-215. 

24 56. The elms are still there, but the short-lived poplars have 
altogether disappeared. (Napier, Homes and Haunts of Tennyson^ P- 14) 
Note the precision of number as characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite 
method of the aesthetic school. 

24 58. The brook : the Somersby beck. See note on " A Farewell." 

24 59. Ribbed sand : Cf. Wordsworth's phrase contributed to 
" The Ancient Mariner," pt. iv, " the ribbed sea-sand." 

24 66. Thick-fleeced: Homeric epithet. (//. iii, 197.) Wattled: 
formed of interwoven twigs or branches. Cf. Milton, " Comus," 344, 
" The folded flocks, penned in their wattled cotes." 

24 67. Wolds : the chalk hills, which occupy the central part of 
the Lindsey division of Lincolnshire, running north-north-west from 
Spilsby to Barton, with a length of about fifty miles and an average 
breadth of seven or eight. Somersby is situated not far from the south- 
eastern extremity of the Wold country. (A. J. Church, The Laureate's 
Country, pp. 4, 7, 8.) 

24 68. Waken' d replaced w^/^/^ in 1842. 

24 70. Amber : See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 322. 

25 96. Pike : the road from Somersby to the sea. See Napier, p. 85. 
25 97-104. A description of the coast of the German Ocean at 

Mablethorpe. The cottage (1. 100), where the Tennysons spent the 
summer holidays, and which is still pointed out to visitors, is reached 
by a little bridge (1. 102), and lies close under the sea-bank. The sand- 
hills or dunes stretch northward to the Humber from Gibraltar Point, 
and by a narrow ridge ward off the sea from the rich marsh-land. " I 
used to stand on this sand-built ridge," Tennyson said, "and think 
that it was the spine-bone of the w^orld." {Mem., I, 20.) Cf., for 
other descriptions of this coast scenery, "Palace of Art," 249-252; 
" Locksley Hall," 5, 6 ; " Last Tournament," 461-466 ; and the " Lines " 
contributed to The Manchester Atheneum Album, 1850. 



THE BEGGAR MAID 333 

25 102. Frequent: in derivative sense of "crowded" or "often 
frequented." (Lat. freqttens.) 

25 103. In 1830: Emblems or glimpses of eternity. 

25 105. A garden: the Somersby garden. See on " A spirit haunts 
the year's last hours." 

25 106. Plaited (1842). Pleached {xZyi). 

26 117. And those was substituted in 1842 for The few, a little 
change which indicates Tennyson's broadening humanity. 

26 118. Myriad-minded : See Coleridge's note to Literaria Bio- 
graphic, ch. XV : — " avrip fivpLovovs, a phrase which I have borrowed 
from a Greek monk, w^ho applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. 

1 might have said, that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it : for 
it seems to belong to Shakespeare de jure siugulari, et ex privilegio 
naturae.^'' 

26 119. You replaced thee, the reading of 1830 and 1842. 

26 120. Were how much: altered in 1850 from Methinks were. 

THE BEGGAR MAID (Page 26) 

Published in 1842. Founded on the old ballad of " King Cophetua 
and the Beggar Maid," in Percy's Reliqiies, I, ii, 4. Cophetua was " a 
princely wight " of " Affrica" ; the name of the beggar maid was Penelo- 
phon. Shakespeare alludes to the story in Love's Labour'' s Lost, i, 
2, 114, iv, I, 66; Richard II, v, 3, 80; Romeo and ftcliet, ii, i, 14; 

2 Henry IV, v, 3, 106. 

The poem is in iambic four-stress verse. Each stanza is composed 
of two quatrains (the first with interwoven, the second with alternate 
rhyme) knit together by a continuous rhyme. The fifth line has an 
internal rhyme. 

26 9. Cf. " Godiva," 45, " Looking like a summer moon Half-dipt 
in cloud." 

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS (Page 27) 

First printed in 1830. It, too, is an Ode to Memory, — the memory 
that enveloped in a golden mist the great romance among the books of 
childhood. Tennyson's recollections seem to have centred particularly 
on the following passages : 

(i) From the Story of Nouredditt and the Fair Persian (at the end 
of the Two Hundred and Thirty-Sixth Night) : " They rambled a 



334 



NOTES 



considerable time along by the gardens that bordered on the Tigris ; and 
keeping close to one of them that was inclosed with a very fine long wall 
at the end of it, they turned into a street well paved, where they perceived 
a garden-door, and a charming fovmtain near it. The door, which was 
very magnificent, happened to be shut, but the porch was open ; in which 
there was a sofa on each side. . . . The garden belonged to the caliph : 
and in the middle of it there was a pavilion. . . . The stately hall within 
this pavilion was lighted by fourscore windows, with a lustre in each. . . . 
They made a glorious illumination, and could be seen at a great distance 
in the country on that side, and by a great part of the city. . . . Nou- 
reddin and the Fair Persian . . . stood awhile to admire [the pavilion's] 
wonderful structure, size, and loftiness ; and after taking a full view of 
it on every side, they went up a great many steps of fine white marble, 
to the hall-door. . . . Besides lustres that were fixed to every window, 
there was between each bar a silver arm with a wax candle in it. . . . 
The caliph had seated himself upon a throne that was in the hall. . . . 
Scheich Ibrahim saw the caliph upon his throne, with the grand vizier 
and Mesrour on each side of him. He stood awhile gazing upon this 
unexpected sight, doubting whether he was awake or asleep. The caliph 
fell alaughing at his astonishment." 

(2) From the History of Aboulhasseii All Ehu Becar, etc. (One Hun- 
dred and Eighty-Sixth Night) : " The walks were of little pebbles cf 
different colours. . . . The prospect round was, at the end of the 
walks, terminated by two canals of clear water ; and curious pots of gilt 
brass, with flowers and shrubs, were set upon the banks of the canal at 
equal distances. These walks lay betwixt great plots of ground planted 
with straight and bushy trees, where a thousand birds formed a melodious 
concert." 

We feel here the underlying influence of Spenser, Milton's Early 
Poems, and Keats, especially in the choice of archaic and compound 
words. When set over against the restraint of Tennyson's later work, 
the description seems too exuberant, the colours too dazzling. 

But there can be no doubt about the rich melody of the verse, which 
is here largely the result of twenty-four double words, borrowed or 
invented. See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 63. The poem is written 
in four-stress iambic,' the EngUsh metre most liable to monotony. 
Variety is secured by the introduction of extra-syllables (as in 1. i), by 
the omission of the first light syllable (in 1. 78), by the frequent trans- 
position of the stress at the beginning of the line (as in 35), by an inter- 
woven syntax which runs-on the sense from one line to the next, and 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 335 

by a rhyme-plan which differs with each new stanza. There are eight 
lines to the stanza, followed by a slightly variable refrain of three lines. 
This refrain (" by the recurrence of which as a sort of mysterious influ- 
ence," said Hallam, " the mind is wrought up with consummate art to 
the final disclosure ") consists of a couplet with a constant rhyme, fol- 
lowed by a three-stressed unrhymed line with feminine ending. A novel 
effect, not realized until the second reading, comes from the removal of 
the first line of the refrain into the body of the opening stanza. There 
are eight approximate rhymes : 23-27, 34-35, 45-47? 50-52, 67-73, 
89-90, 102-106, 135-136. 

27 10. Golden prime: A phrase of Shakespeare's, Richard III, 
i, 2, 248; used also by Shelley, " Epipsychidion," 192. Prime is the 
first part of anything, whether it be the day, the year, or life. 

27 12. Anight : at night. Cf. Chaucer, House of Fame, 42 : " To 
make folk to dreme a-nyght." 

27 13. Bloomed : full of blossoms. " All in the bloomed May " was 
the refrain in Tennyson's " The lintwhite and the throstlecock " (1830). 
The word is unusual, Cf. Dunbar, Golden Targe, 55 : " Hard on burd 
unto the blomyt medis . . . Arrivit sche." Drove: apparently in the 
unique sense of " drove through " or " over." 

28 29. Braided blooms took the place in 1842 of " breaded blosms," 
two Spenserian spellings which looked offensively archaic. {Faerie 
Queene, ii, 2, st. 15; and iv, 8, st. 2.) Tennyson wrote "blosm-white silk " 
in " Dualisms," and " the blosmy brere " in *' The lintwhite and the 
throstlecock," poems of 1830. 

28 47. Rivage: bank. Cf. Faerie Queene, iv, 6, st. 20. 

28 48. Rillets: tiny streams. Cf. Keats, Endymion, ii, 945. 

28 58. Engrain'd : Cf. Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, Februarie, 
131, "With Leaves engrained in lusty greene," which it was thought 
necessary to explain in the " glosse " as " dyed in grain." 

29 68. Coverture : Cf. Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, Julye, 26. 
29 70. Bulbul : the Persian nightingale, ever singing to his love the 

rose ; made familiar in English poetry by Sir William Jones, Byron, 
and Tom Moore. Cf. Princess, iv, 104. 

29 78. Black the (1842). In 1830: Blackgreen. Changed at the 
instance of Hallam, who said in his review in The Englishman'' s Magazine 
(August 1831): " We doubt the propriety of using the bold compound 
' black-green,' at least in such close vicinity to ' gold-green.' " 

29 82. Gold-green: Cf. Keats, Endymion, iii, 878: "A gold-green 
zenith 'bove the Sea-God's head." 



336 NOTES 

29 84. Counterchanged : chequered. Cf. In Mem., Ixxxix, i, 
" Witch-elms that counterchange the floor," and " MerUn and Vivien," 
464. 

29 86. Of dark and bright in 1842 replaced Of saffron light. 

30 90. Inlaid was substituted in 1842 for unrayed ; another change 
due to Hallam's friendly criticism. 

30 100. Drawn in 1842 replaced borne, for the rhyme's sake. 

30 101. Pleasance : pleasure ; often found in this sense in Spenser, 
as, e.g., " Epithalamion," 90. 

30 103. Stilly sound : Cf. Shakespeare, Henry V, iv, Prologue, 
1. 5, " The hum of either army stilly sounds," 

30 105. Tamarisks : a shrub of western Asia, which bears clouds 
of pink flowers in late summer. 

30 106. Rosaries: rose-gardens, from L. L. rosarium. Hallam 
thought this " an entirely unauthorised use of the word," but cf. 
Machin, Dumb Knight, iv, i : 

" Is there a Hercules that dare to touch 
Or enter the Hesperian rosaries ? " 

30 117. Broad-based: a characteristic compound of Tennyson. 
Used also in "Egypt," 16 (in Poems by Two Brothers), "Supposed 
Confessions," 128, "A Fragment," 10, " To the Queen," 35. 

31 123. QuinTessence : so accented in " The Day Dream," 236, and 
" Aylmer's Field," 388 ; but on the second syllable in " Palace of Art," 
187. With Milton also the accent is not fixed. (Contrast Par. Lost, iii, 
716, and vii, 244.) Shakespeare accents the first syllable. 

31 125. Twisted (1842): wreathed {\%yS). Silvers: The plural is 
perhaps an invention of Tennyson. He used it also in the sonnet, 
" The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain" (1830). 

31 127. Mooned : surmounted with the crescent. 

31 138. Redolent : For the use of this word without a quaUfying 
phrase, cf. Fabyan, Chron. I, ccxxxviii : — 

" In this grave full derke nowe is her bowre, 
That by her lyfe was sweete and redolent." 

31 140. Beneath (1842) avoided the rhyme made by below (1830) 
with " Flow-ing." 

31 148. Diaper'd: diversified with the same figure often repeated. 
Cf. Spenser, "Epithalamion," 51. 



THE DAISY 337 

THE DAISY (Page 32) 

This poem, written in the summer of 1853 and published in the 
Maud volume of 1855, is the record of a journey taken by Tennyson 
and his wife in 1851, the year after their marriage. On July 15th they 
left England for Boulogne. (See Mem., I, 340, 364.) An excellent 
commentary on the poem is supplied by a letter from Mrs. Tennyson 
to Mrs. Coventry Patmore, dated Nov. 3, 1851 {Memoirs and Corre- 
spondence of Coventry Patmore, by Basil Champneys, II, 306) : — " We 
arrived honte last Wednesday evening, after having seen and enjoyed 
much. . . . We were stationary for so short a time, except at the Bagni 
di Lucca and at Florence, that there was little chance of writing. . . . 
We went by the Rhone and the Riviera, taking the usual road, except 
that we did not go so far as Marseilles, but crossed from Aix to Frejus, 
and a pleasant drive it was a great part of the way. I looked for the 
first time on the stone pines, and smelt their delicious odour, and we 
gathered our first wild myrtle in the course of it. The olives were 
more beautiful than I expected: they, with their soft gray and with 
their violet shades, had an inexpressible charm, growing down close 
into the blue sea. The palm trees too sometimes added a little to 
the scene when in favourable situations, standing for instance against 
the sky on a projecting rock, or overtopping the olives and lemons. . . . 
[From the Bagni] we went to Pisa: . . . thence to Florence, an enchant- 
ing city. Thence to Bologna and the Lombard cities : continual rain 
all our way: still we continued to visit and admire the old Lombard 
cities, the Churches especially. I have got to think no Church inside 
perfect without a dome : no Church indeed I think quite perfect without 
its five aisles and arches reaching near the roof, and no triforium nor 
clerestory, but all the three tiers of windows seen one above another, 
and the windows of the dome above these : such is Milan Cathedral. 
Perfect it seems to me in the conception of its internal parts, imperfect 
in those of the outside, . . . From Milan we went to the Lake of Como : 
very beautiful : then to Chiavenna on our way over the Splugen ; also 
very beautiful, with an imperial kind of beauty. W^e came home by 
Zurich and the Rhine ; went out of our way to Heidelberg and after- 
wards to Antwerp ; but I will say no more except that my husband 
looks thin and is not, I fear, the better for his journey, though not so 
much the worse that he does not talk of Rome and Naples next year." 

The poem is noteworthy for the grace and colour of its descriptive 
touches, and for its versification. The dainty metre is in four-stress 



338 NOTES 

iambic quatrains, of which the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme, 
and the third line is left unrhymed. The stanza gains individuality 
also from the feminine ending of the third line, and the extra light 
syllable in the third bar of the last line. The effect of all this is to 
give a playful dance to the end of the stanza. For a variation on the 
same metre, see " To the Rev. F. D. Maurice." Mr. Gwynn's suppo- 
sition (Tennyson, p. 218) that the suggestion came from Fitzgerald's 
famous Persian quatrain (which has the same rhyme-order) is a little 
unfortunate, because The Rubdiydt of Otnar Khayyam was not begun 
until 1857. The true explanation comes from Tennyson himself (who 
thought this among the best of the many metres he invented). He 
called it " a far-off echo of the Horatian Alcaic." (See, e.g.. Odes, i, 9 ; 
and Tennyson's Alcaics, " Milton.") In the Alcaic we find the light 
ending to the third line, and the triple measure in the fourth. There 
are two echo-rhymes (41-42 ; 50-52, where it is quite effective) and 
one approximate rhyme (101-102-104). 

32 5. Turbia : a little village, two miles northwest of Monaco, 
w^hich takes its name from a remarkable mass of solid ruin, — all 
that is left of the " Trophaea Augusti," erected by the Senate to 
commemorate the subjugation of the Ligurian tribes. 

32 6. Mountain road : the " Corniche." There is a play on the 
name in 1. 19. See Mem., II, 46. 

32 13. Campanili : the tall detached bell-towers of Italy. 

32 14. Sketched from Nature by Tennyson during a tour in Corn- 
wall, June 8, 1848. {Mem., I, 275.) ColUns compares Southey, Madoc 
in Wales, xiii, " Llewelyn " : — 

" One glowing green expanse, 
Save where along the bending line of shore 
Such hue is thrown, as when the peacock's neck 
Assumes its proudest tint of amethyst, 
Embathed in emerald glory." 

32 23. Cogoletto : c. 15 miles west of Genoa; one of the towns 
which claim to be the birthplace of Columbus, and which have erected 
a monument in his honour. The reputed house of his father Domenico 
is still pointed out. 

33 31. Olive-hoary: See on "Palace of Art," 80. 
33 36. Up replaced off, the reading of 1855. 

33 37. That hall: Palgrave, who probably consulted Tennyson, 
says that this is the hall in the Palazzo Ducale at Genoa. See Murray's 



THE DAISY 339 

Handbook of N^orthern Italy (1852) : — " The hall also contains statues 
of the great men of Genoa. These were destroyed by the French in 
1797; and upon the fete given to Napoleon as the restorer of the 
liberties of Italy, their places were supplied by statues of straw and 
wicker-work coated with plaster of Paris, with draperies of calico, which 
still continue in the room." 

33 43. Cascine : the park of Florence, a fashionable rendezvous in 
the afternoon, particularly for driving. 

33 44. Boboli's ducal bowers : the Boboli garden in the rear of the 
Pitti Palace, since 1550 the residence of the reigning sovereign of 
Florence (long a duchy), and now of the King of Italy when he comes 
to the city. 

33 46. Duomo : the Cathedral of Florence. 

33 50, 51. To the traveller from Florence these cities are in the 
following order: Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Lodi. 

34 55, 56. This description would apply to the duomos of Parma 
and Piacenza, and to many other Lombard churches. 

34 57 ff. The Cathedral at Milan is the largest church in Europe, 
after St. Peter's and the Cathedral of Seville. The three vast stained- 
glass windows in the choir are said to be, without exception, the 
largest in the world. The roof, marble like the rest of the edifice, is 
decorated with ninety-eight turrets, and the exterior with some two 
thousand statues. From the roof one gains a magnificent view of the 
Alps, especially of Monte Rosa, lying to the northwest. 

34 75. Rustic : because in the Georgics (ii, 159): — 

" Anne lacus tantos ? te, Lari maxima, teque, 
Fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens, Benace, marino ? " 

The Latin name of Lake Como was Lacus Larius ; hence the name of 
the steamboat. 

34 79. That fair port : Varenna, on the eastern shore, surrounded 
by cypress gardens. See Lund, Como a?td the Italian Lake-Land, 
p. 91 : — "There is a tradition that after her patriotic labours Theude- 
linda sought rest, and at last ended her days in the old castle which 
crowns the hill above Varenna" [the Torre di Vezio]. Theodolind 
(d. 628) was the beautiful daughter of Garibald, duke of Bavaria, and 
married first Anthari, king of the Lombards, and, upon his death, 
Agilulf, duke of Turin. 

35 84. Agave : the American aloe, or century-plant, introduced 
from Mexico into Europe in 1561. 



340 



NOTES 



35 86. Splugen: German, Spliigen; one of the passes over the 
Alps, not far from the northern end of Lake Como. Its summit is 
6945 feet high. 

35 92. Across, i^^^: beyond. 

35 93. So dear a life: i.e., Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, 
born Aug. 11, 1852. 

EARLY SPRING (Page 36) 

This vernal melody was first published in The Youth'' s Companion^ 
Boston, Dec. 13, 1883, and was included in Tiresias, and Other 
Poems, 1885. The theme is the renewal of the earth by the Spirit of 
Life, and the Poet's sympathetic reawakening to Memory and Hope 
and Fancy and Song. The poem should be compared with Words- 
worth's lines " Written in March, while resting on the Bridge at the 
Foot of Brother's Water." 

The metre is really an iambic verse of five stresses, rhymed in 
triplets, but by arranging each triplet into a six-line stanza, with three 
accents in 11. 1,3, 5, and two accents in 11. 2, 4, 6, and by introducing 
a rhyme between the third and fifth lines, a peculiar and charming air 
of lightness and simplicity is given to the verse. It 

Rings little bells of change 
From word to word. 

The unity of the lyric is rounded out by echoing, in the last stanza, the 
rhymes and in large part the words of the first. 

36 9. A Jacob's ladder: "a meteoric appearance resembling broad 
beams of light from heaven to earth. A somewhat similar phenomenon 
may be seen when the sun shines through the chink or hole of a closed 
shutter." (Brewer, Reader's Handbook.) Cf. Gen., xxviii, 12. 

36 17. Stars : Longfellow says of Carove, in " Flowers " : — 

" He called the flowers, so blue and golden, 
Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine." 

36 19. With. In 1883: in. 

87 30. Cf. "St. Agnes' Eve," 11, and Princess, v, 188-189. 

37 34. Some. In 1883: a. Fell: moorland ridge. 

37 38. Thou twinkling bird : Canon Ainger (note ad loc. in 
Tennyson for the Young) suggests that the sedge-warbler is meant, but 
from the context it would seem that the " chuckled note " is the 
blackbird's. 



THE DYING SWAN 341 



THE DYING SWAN (Page 38) 

Christopher North could find nothing good to 
say of the poem, though he had heard it praised by his friend Hartley 
Coleridge. With the exception of 11. 11-13, the scenery is that of 
" Lincolnshire under its least cheerful aspect, when the east wind 
prevails." (Drummond Rawnsley, in Memoirs of the Tennysons, p. 195.) 
The picture, as usual in Tennyson, takes its tone and colour from the 
prevailing emotion. The myth that the swan sings just before its 
death has been a poetical commonplace since classic times. See Plato, 
Phaedo, 84 E, and Sir Thomas Browne, Vulgar Errors, Bk. iii, ch. 27. 
Tennyson alludes to it also in " Morte d' Arthur," 266 ff., and the original 
version of " The Lady of Shalott " (p. 367). 

The metre is that irregular rhymed verse of varying length and stress, 
but generally iambic, which Cowley made popular in England under 
the misleading name of the Pindaric Ode. The use of triple (or 
anapaestic) measure in 25-42 gives a musical freedom to the rhythm. 
The rhymes are intricately interlaced, except at the beginning and the 
end, where groups of three lines make full and prolonged chords. 
There are four approximate rhymes. As originally printed there were 
but two strophes. The strange and stately rhythm of the verse w^as 
brought out by Tennyson as he read it aloud, chanting the irregular 
lines and prolonging the rhymes of the last stanza with " hollow oes 
and aes." 

38 7. And. From 1830 till 1848: Which. 

38 10. Took : seized or smote. 

38 16. Was replaced in 1842 sung, and added to the alliteration on 
■w, which extends through several lines. 

38 18. Marish : an obsolete form of "marsh," used by Spenser 
i^F. Q., V, 10, St. 23). Cf. "Mariana," 40, and "On a Mourner," 10. 

38 21. Took: captivated, charmed. Cf. Winter's Tale, iv, 4, 119, 
and " Comus," 256, "Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd 
soul." 

39 26. Coronach: a lamentation for the dead. (Gaelic, corranach.) 
39 32. Shawms : Tennyson probably uses the word as equivalent 

to " cornet " or " horn," as in the Prayer Book version of Psalm 
xcviii. 

39 33. Tumult of their acclaim : Cf. In Mem., Ixxv, 20. 

39 39. Horns: projections and indentations. Cf. "horned flood" in 
Paradise Lost, xi, 831, and In Mem., Ixxxvi, 7. 



342 



NOTES 



THE EAGLE (Page 39) 



First printed in the seventh edition of the Poems, 1851. It is a frag- 
ment, and yet a complete picture. "The wrinkled sea" perfectly 
describes the ocean as seen from a great height. 

The metre is a regular iambic four-stressed verse rhymed in tercets. 
Observe the value of the transposed accent in 11. 2 and 3. Tennyson 
used the same metre in " The Two Voices," and Mrs. Browning in " A 
Vision of Poets." 

39 1. Crooked. In 1851 : hooked; the earlier word was more pre- 
cise and picturesque. 

THE OAK (Page 40) 

This and " Far — Far — Away " were Tennyson's favourite poems in 
the Demeter collection of 1889. He thought it might be called "clean 
cut like a Greek epigram." {Mem., II, 366.) The young leaves of the 
oak in spring are of a reddish gold colour and shining ; in the autumn 
they are dull gold. When they fall, the peculiarly massive setting of 
the boughs is apparent. The short and simple words of the poem suit 
the subject; they are all monosyllables except six. See The Poetry 
of Tennyson, p. 294. 

The metre is a regular two-stress verse ; but it may be read either 
as a trochaic with the last bar incomplete, or as an iambic with first 
unstressed syllable omitted. The measure is as perfect as one of 
Herrick's ; it is to be found in Pope's " To Quinbus Flestrin, the 
Man-Mountain" (Globe Ed., p. 491), with the lines rhymed in couplets. 



THE SEA-FAIRIES (Page 40) 

Published in 1830, but, being ridiculed, suppressed until 1853, when 
it reappeared with extensive alterations. It is notable as the first of 
the classical studies, a preliminary experiment in the field of " The 
Lotos-Eaters." The source of suggestion was Odyssey, xii, 166-193: 
" Meanwhile our good ship came to the island of the Sirens twain, for 
a gentle breeze sped her on her way. . . . But when the ship was 
within the sound of a man's shout from the land, we fleeing swiftly on 
our way, the Sirens espied the swift ship speeding toward them, and 
they raised their clear-toned song : ' Hither, come hither, renowned 
Odysseus, . . . here stay thy barque, that thou mayest listen to the 



THE SEA-FAIRIES 343 

voice of us twain. For none hath ever driven by this way in his black 
ship, till he hath heard from our lips the voice sweet as the honeycomb, 
and hath had joy thereof and gone on his way the wiser.' ... So 
spake they uttering a sweet voice, and my heart was fain to listen." 
(Translation of Butcher and Lang.) 

Tennyson's first blank verse is in "Timbuctoo" (1829); it is unmis- 
takably Miltonic. In the introduction to " The Sea-Fairies " and " The 
Mystic" (1830), a new blank verse made itself heard, simpler in diction, 
less majestic, more fluent. Considerable mastery of technique is already 
manifest. There is a sharp contrast between the open vowels of the 
first line and the rapid run of the second. The metre of the song is 
generally anapaestic, m6rry with the multitudinous laughter of the sea. 
It owes its unity partly to Tennyson's device of reiterating words and 
phrases, partly to the rhyme on "lea" which recurs throughout. The 
closer the rhymes come together, the quicker is the movement. There 
is but one approximate rhyme, 32-34. 

40 2. Betwixt. In 1830: Betxveen, which rhymed with "green." 
After this fine originally stood 

White limbs unrobed in a chrystal air. 

41 24. Bight : from O.E. biigaji, to bend ; and so any bending, espe- 
cially of a rope ; when applied to the coast line, it means either a corner 
of a bay, or a shallow and slightly receding bay. " In bight and bay " 
occurs also in " The Voyage of Maeldune," 53. 

41 27. The rainbow lives in the curve of the sand : " There is in 
Tennyson's ' Sea- Fairies ' a passage — a rather ambiguous one — which 
would seem to allude to one of the loveliest of all visions, which may 
sometimes be seen in a small lake, or in a slowly-moving stream like the 
Ouse, and even sometimes on the smooth sands of the East coast, when 
they are covered with a thin surface of sea- water — a reflected rainbow." 
(Theodore Watts in The Nineteetith Century, May 1893.) 

41 39. Ridged sea : The phrase is Shakespeare's : — " Horns whelk'd 
and waved like the enridged sea." {King Lear, iv, 6, 71.) The ridge 
of a wave is an image which recurs frequently in Tennyson — ten or 
twelve times, at least. It is also in Charles Tennyson Turner's sonnet 
" The Ocean." 

The 1830 version of the song is as follows : — 

Whither awaj', whither away, whither away ? Fly no more : 

Whither away wi' the singing sail ? whither away wi' the oar ? 

Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossoming shore ? 



344 NOTES 

Weary mariners, hither away, 

One and all, one and all, 
Weary mariners come and play; 
We will sing to you all the day; 

Furl the sail and the foam will fall 

From the prow ! One and all 

Furl the sail ! drop the oar ! 
Leap ashore ! 
Know danger and trouble and toil no more. 
Whither away wi' the sail and the oar? 

Drop the oar, 
Leap ashore, 
Fly no more ! 
Whither away wi' the sail? whither away wi' the oar? 
Day and night to the billow the fountain calls: 
Down shower the gambolling waterfalls 

From wandering over the lea; 
They freshen the silvery-crimson shells, 
And thick with white bells the cloverhill swells 

High over the fulltoned sea. 
Merrily carol the revelling gales 

Over the islands free: 
From the green seabanks the rose downtrails 

To the happy brimmed sea. 
Come hither, come hither, and be our lords. 

For merry brides are we: 
We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words. 
Oh listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten 
With pleasure and love and revelry ; 
Oh listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten, 
When the sharp clear twang of the golden chords 

Runs up the ridged sea. 
Ye will not find so happy a shore 
Weary mariners ! all the world o'er ; 

Oh ! fly no more ! 
Hearken ye, hearken ye, sorrow shall darken ye, 
Danger and trouble and toil no more; 
Whither away ? 

Drop the oar ; 
Hither away. 
Leap ashore ; 
Oh fly no more — no more. 
Whither away, whither away, whither away with the sail and the oar? 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 345 

The changes consist mainly in abbreviation and concentration, in the 
enriching of a thin and trivial melody, and in the introduction of the 
fine Unes about the rainbow. Moreover, there is in 1853 less insistence 
on the weariness of the mariners, a theme which meanwhile had been 
developed in " The Lotos-Eaters," 

THE LOTOS-EATERS (Page 42) 

Published in 1833. It is referred to in a letter, written by Charles 
Merivale to W. H. Thompson before the middle of 1832, as one of the 
MSS. passed around the Apostolic brotherhood at Canibridge. {Mem., 
I, 86.) The time of " The Lotos-Eaters " is afternoon ; the scene is the 
seashore ; and the landscape is invented to harmonize with the feeling 
of lassitude and the desire of repose. In this last respect comparison 
should be made with Spenser's description of the House of Morpheus 
{Faerie Queene, i, i, st. 39-41) and the Idle Lake (ii, 6, st. 11-25), ^"^ 
with Thomson's Castle of Indolence, i, st. 2-6. The germ of the poem 
is the following passage from Homer : " But on the tenth day we 
set foot on the land of the lotos-eaters, who eat a flowery food. So 
we stepped ashore and drew water, and straightway my company took 
their midday meal by the swift ships. Now when we had tasted meat 
and drink I sent forth certain of my company to go and make search 
what manner of men they were who here live upon the earth by bread, 
and I chose out two of my fellows, and sent a third with them as herald. 
Then straightway they went and mixed with the men of the lotos- 
eaters, and so it was that the lotos-eaters devised not death for our 
fellows, but gave them of the lotos to taste. Now whosoever of them 
did eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos, had no more wish to bring 
tidings nor to come back, but there he chose to abide with the lotos- 
eating men, ever feeding on the lotos, and forgetful of his homeward 
way. Therefore I led them back to the ships weeping, and sore against 
their will, and dragged them beneath the benches, and bound them in the 
hollow barques." {Od. ix, 83 ff. Translation of Butcher and Lang.) 

The first part of this poem is written in the Spenserian stanza, which 
consists of a ballad-stave of eight five-stress iambic lines with an 
Alexandrine added to it and rhyming with the last verse. This is the 
measure of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Byron's Childe Harold, 
Keats's " Eve of St. Agnes," and Shelley's Adonais. On Tennyson's 
use of it, see H. Corson, Primer of English Verse, p. 132. The over- 
flow in 11. 8, 19, 20, 21, 22; the management of the pauses in 9; and 



346 NOTES 

the throbbing rhythm of 36, are noteworthy. The Choric Song is in 
an irregular metre, in which the sound matches the sense. Observe 
how 11. 53-56 are successively prolonged from three to six stresses, 
giving the impression of languor. All the stanzas except iii and viii 
end with the full sweep of the Alexandrine. The prevailing movement 
is iambic, and the change in 11. 150 ff. to a distinct trochaic cadence 
with long verses rhymed in triplets has " a highly artistic effect, that 
of throwing the bulk of the poem as it were into a remote distance." 
(Aubrey de Vere in Mem., I, 504.) The song closes with a return to 
the slower iambic measure in 172-173. There are four approximate 
rhymes : 70-71, 93-95-96, 108-109, 131-132 ; and two assonant rhymes : 
80-81, 97-98. In 1. 74 there is an internal rhyme. 

42 1. The land: Located by Herodotus (iv, 177) on the north 
coast of Africa, and placed by Kiepert south of Carthage in modern 
Tunis. 

42 7. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon: In 1833 the 
reading was : — ■ Above the valley burned the golden moon. The adjective 
" golden " conflicted with 1. 38, which indicates a time when the moon 
would be of palest silver. " Full-faced " was transferred from " The 
Hesperides," .st. iv (suppressed in 1842). 

42 8. Downward : Used as an adjective by Milton. (" II Pen.," 43.) 
Smoke : Cf. Ovid, Met., i, 567 ff., and Lamartine, prose version of 
" Le Lac " : " Les cascades descendaient dans les ravins comme des 
ftimees d''eaii.'''' 

42 11. Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn: See Tennyson's 
letter to S. E. Dawson {A Study of the Princess, 2d ed., 1884; reprinted 
in Mejn., I, 259) : " When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on 
a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a water- 
fall [in the Cirque de Gavarnie] that comes down one thousand or 
twelve hundred feet I sketched it (according to my custom then) in 
these words. When I printed this, a critic informed me that 'lawn' 
was the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and graciously 
added, ' Mr. T. should not go to the boards of a theatre but to Nature 
herself for his suggestions.' And I had gone to Nature herself. I 
think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how that effect w^as 
produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line." 

42 14. River replaced in 1842 river'' s, and so avoided the hissing 
conjunction of two j's, which Tennyson particularly disliked. A cor- 
rection like this he called "kicking the geese out of the boat." (See 
Mem., II, 14.) 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 347 

42 16. Three silent pinnacles of aged snow (1842). The 1833 
reading was : — 

Three thundercloven thrones of oldest snow. 

Thunder was out of place in lotos-land. 

42 19. Adown : a Spenserian word, much affected by Tennyson in 
his early poetry. 

42 23. Galingale: the Kvireipo^ of Theocritus, v, 45, xiii, 35. Pal- 
grave (note ad loc.) defines it as the Cype^-us lougtis, a kind of sedge, 
the word being used here for the Papyrus species. Cf. Spenser, 
" Muiopotmos," 194. 

42 28. Branches they bore of that enchanted stem : This is not 
the water-lily of Egypt, but a low shrub with a reddish fruit about the 
size of an olive, tasting like the date. (Herodotus, iv, 177.) 

43 34. His voice was thin: Cf. Theocritus, xiii, 59, dpaia <pu)vd, 
which Virgil translated into " vocem exiguam " {Aen., vi, 492), and Ovid 
adapted into " exiguo mui'mure" {Fasti, v, 458). 

43 38. Between the sun and moon : The full moon had risen while 
the setting sun was still above the horizon. Tennyson had often seen 
this phenomenon on the low dunes of the Lincolnshire coast, said to be 
the only place in England where it can be well observed. (Drummond 
Rawnsley in Memories of the Tennysons, p. 192; Cuthbert Bede, quot- 
ing the Bishop of Ely, N. and Q., 5th S., XII, Oct. 18, 1879.) It is often 
seen in America. Cf. " Eleanore," 124. 

43 42. Fields: So Virgil, Ae;i., vi, 724, "campos liquentis"; and 
viii, 695, " arva Neptunia." 

43 44. Our island home : Ithaca, the " little isle " of 1. 124. 

43 51. Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes : The scansion of this 
line has been superfluously discussed. The key is found in the edition 
of 1842, which reads, " Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes." But per- 
ceiving that stupidly exact persons, in order to make the line perfectly 
iambic, would persist in reading " tired " as an ugly dissyllable, " ti-red," 
Tennyson struck out the e and returned to the original reading " tir'd." 
The word has- a long drawling sound which corresponds to the sense. 
The lengthened quantity makes up for the missing syllable. Cf. 
Moschus, i, 3, 4, and Virgil, Ec/., v, 45. 

44 66. Slumber's holy balm : Cf. Macbeth, ii, 2, 36. 

44 82. Hath no toil : Cf. Matt., vi, 28. 

45 84, 85. Hateful, etc.: Cf. Virgil, Aen., iv, 451: "taedet caeli 
convexa tueri." 



348 NOTES 

45 86, 87. Cf. Bion, v, 11-15. 

45 95. Climbing: Cf. Othello, ii, i, 189, and, with the passage 
that follows, Moschus, v, 4-13. 

45 102. Amber light: Milton's phrase, " L'Al.," 61. 

45 108, 109. Lend our hearts, etc. : Tennyson borrowed this from 
his sonnet, " Check every outflash, every ruder sally," published in The 
Englishman'' s Magazine, October 1831 : 

Give up wholly 
Thy spirit to mild-minded melancholy. 

45 HI. Those (1842). In 1833: the. 

45 111-113. The beauty of sorrow has seldom been so beautifully 
expressed as in these three lines. L. 113 is a fine development of 
Horace's "pulvis et umbra sumus." {Odes, iv, 7, 16.) 

46 114-132. This stanza was added in 1842. It lends a new sense 
of human interest to the poem. 

46 120-123. Probably suggested by Od., i, 325 ff. 

46 131. By: substituted in 1863 for with (1842). 

46 132. Pilot-stars : Odysseus steers in Od., v, 270-277, with his 
eye upon the Great Bear, the Pleiades, and Bootes. Cf. Milton, 
"Comus," 341. 

46 133. In 1833: Or, propt on lavish beds of amaranth aiid moly. 
Amaranth and moly : classical flowers, used by Milton {Par. Lost, iii, 
352, "Comus," 636). Amaranth means in Greek "unfading"; it was 
applied by Pliny to a purple flower which could be revived indefinitely 
if dipped in water. {Nat. Hist., xxi, 23.) Cf. " Romney's Remorse," 
106. For moly see Od., x, 305, " It was black at the root, but the 
flower was like to milk. Moly the gods call it, but it is hard for mortal 
men to dig ; howbeit with the gods all things are possible." 

46 135. Eyelid. From 1833 to 185 1 eyelids. See above on 14. 

47 141. Watch: Before 1851: hear. 

47 142. Acanthus : bear's breech, or brank-ursine, mentioned by 
Virgil {Aen., i, 649) and Milton {Par. Lost, iv, 696). 
47 145. Barren replaced flowery in 1851. 
47 150. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, etc. 

We have had enough of motion, 
Weariness and wild alarm, 
Tossing on the tossing ocean, 
Where the tasked seahorse walloweth 
In a stripe of grassgreen calm^ 



THE LOTOS-EATERS 349 

At noon tide beneath the lea ; 

And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth 

His foanifountains in the sea. 

Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry. 

This is lovelier and sweeter, 

Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, 

In a hollow rosy vale to tarry, 

Like a dreamy Lotos-eater, a delirious Lotos-eater ! 

We will eat the Lotos, sweet 

As the yellow honeycomb, 

In the valley some, and some 

On the ancient heights divine ; 

And no more roam. 

On the loud hoar foam, 

To the melancholy home 

At the limit of the brine. 

The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decUne. 

We'll lift no more the shattered oar. 

No more unfurl the straining sail ; 

With the blissful Lotoseaters pale 

We will abide in the golden vale 

Of the Lotos-land, till the Lotos fail ; 

We will not wander more. 

Hark! how sweet the horned ewes bleat 

On the solitary steeps, 

And the merry lizard leaps, 

And the foamwhite waters pour; 

And the dark pine weeps, 

And the lithe vine creeps. 

And the heavy melon sleeps 

On the level of the shore : 

Oh ! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more. 

Surely, surely slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 

Than labour in the ocean, and rowing with the oar. 

Oh ! islanders of Ithaca, we will return no more. 

These lines closed the poem in 1833, and excited the ridicule of Lock- 
hart. A comparison with the present version, adopted in 1842, shows 
the nature and extent of Tennyson's growth during these " ten years 
of silence." The earlier version is more realistic in manner; details 
like " the tusked seahorse," " a stripe of grassgreen calm," " the yellow 
honeycomb," " the horned ewes," " the merry lizard," " the lithe vine," 
" the foamwhite waters," were painted out-of-doors en plein air. But 
the landscape of the later version is "composed" and coloured by the 



350 NOTES 

poet's fancy. The rhythm is more perfect, less eccentric, and closer 
fitted to the meaning. The style is more condensed and expressive ; 
the same effect is produced with fewer strokes. Compare 1. 154 with 
the twenty-five lines of description in the first edition. The impression 
of luxurious forgetfulness is quite as well conveyed by the single 
phrase " In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined." But 
the great gain is in the depth and breadth of the poet's human sym- 
pathy, that feeling for the brotherhood of man which Tennyson for 
the first time clearly voiced in his poems of 1842. This is revealed 
here by the insertion of the significant comparison of the indolent, 
self-indulgent life of the Lotos-eaters to the existence of the idle, 
egotistic gods of Lucretius. Compare the lines on " the younger 
kindlier Gods" (129 ff.) in " Demeter and Persephone." 

47 156. For they lie beside their nectar, etc. : This passage (as also 
"Lucretius," 104-110) is expanded from L,ucretius, De J^er. JVat.,m, 18-24. 
Parallels are suggested with Lucian, Icaromenipptis^ ch. xxv to end, and 
Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, iv, 5, 55 ff., " Sie aber, sie bleiben," etc. 

48 170. Asphodel : a plant of the lily kind, made an immortal 
flower by the poets, and said by Homer to cover the Elysian meads. 
(O^., xi, 539.) Cf. " Demeter and Persephone," last line, and Milton, 
Par. Lost., ix, 1040. In English the word has been transformed into 
daffodil. 

ISABEL (Page 48) 

Printed in 1830. The title of this poem, like that of the next, may 
have been suggested by Measure for Measure., whose heroine Isabella 
is Shakespeare's supreme type of chastity. It is the least musical and 
the most stately of the portraits of women which appeared in Poems., 
Chiefly Lyrical and the Poems of 1833 (" LiUan," " Isabel," " Madeline," 
"Adeline," " Eleanore," "Rosalind," "Margaret," and "Kate"). See 
The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 323. The original of the portrait was Ten- 
nyson's mother, Elizabeth Fytche (1781-1865), whom Edward Fitzgerald 
called " one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw," 
and of whom Charles Tennyson Turner said, " All there is of good and 
kind in any of us came from her tender heart." She is further described 
in The Princess, vii, 298-312, and in Charles Tennyson Turner's "My 
Mother." 

The metre is five-stress iambic, rhyming irregularly. The occurrence 
of long vowels where short ones would naturally be expected makes the 
movement meditatively slow and in some cases difficult. 



MARIANA 351 

48 1-5. Cf. Shelley, Revolt of Islam (Dedication, st. xi): — 

"And, through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see 
A lamp of vestal fire burning internally." 

48 5. Dispread : spread out. Cf. Spenser, F. Q., iv, 7, st. 40. 

48 6. Madonna-wise : i.e., with hair parted in the middle, and 
smoothed over the brow, as in the Sistine Madonna. 

48 8. Summer calm: This is contrasted with " Madeline," 2, " No 
tranced summer calm is thine." 

48 12. Lowlihead: humility. Perhaps Tennyson invented the word. 

49 1:3. Intuitive decision : Tennyson wrote in 1833: — " My mother 
... is one of the most angelic natures on God's earth, always doing 
good as it were by a sort of intuition." {Mem., I, loi.) 

49 16, 17. Cf. 2 Cor., iii, 3, "not in tables of stone, but in fleshly 
tables of the heart " ; Prov., iii, 3 ; and Shakespeare, Sotinet cxxii, 1,2: — 

" Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain 
Full character'd with lasting memory." 

The phrase is, however, as old as Aeschylus. {Protnetheus Boii?id, 789: 
Tfv iyypdcpov crv ^yrjixoa-iv deXrois (fypevibv, — " This do thou engrave on the 
mindful tablets of thine heart." Cf. Etcmenides, 275.) 

49 16. Marriage (1842) : JF/y^/zf?^^ (1830), changed perhaps because 
it had been used already in 1. 12, perhaps because it was less simple. 

49 17. Blanched replaced in 1S42 blenched, which carried a conno- 
tation of fear. 

49 40. Charity: love; as in the Authorized Version of i Cor., xiii. 
See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 250. 



MARIANA (Page 50) 

This poem was first printed in 1830. The subject is taken from 
Shakespeare's suggestion, in Measure for Measure, of a lady to whom 
the villain Angelo had been betrothed, but whom he had deserted, and 
who still waited for him at her lonely house in the country. (See iii, 
I, 216-281 ; iv, I, 1-9.) Tennyson transferred the scene to Lincoln- 
shire, without locating it in any particular house. (Cf. Mem., I, 4 : " The 
Moated Grange is an imaginary house in the fen ; I never so much as 
dreamed of Baumber's farm as the abode of Mariana.") In the volume 
of 1833 he published another variation on the same theme, called " Mari- 
ana in the South," in which the local colour is taken from the country 
between Narbonne and Perpignan. Both of these pieces belong to the 



352 NOTES 

order of Landscape-poetry: the objects described are natural and in 
their proper places ; but they are seen through the medium of a human 
emotion, which heightens the effect of lonehness and monotony. ( The 
Poetry of Tennysoji, p. 67.) In the precise and delicate truth with which 
the details of the background are brought out, they are distinctly pre- 
Raphaelite, though written twenty years before the publication of The 
Germ. 

The poem is in regular iambic verse of four stresses, a metre modelled 
on the French rhyming couplet of eight syllables. (R. M. Alden, English 
Verse, pp. 160 ff.) The stanza is composed of two quatrains (the first 
with interwoven, the second with close, rhyme), and a burthen of four 
Unes in common metre (four stresses to the first and third, and three 
stresses to the second and fourth). There is an extra syllable, for 
imitative effect, in 1. 50. Observe the subtle changes in the burthen, 
especially in the last stanza. 

50 4. That held the pear to the gable-wall : The reading of 1830 
was. That held the peach to the gardenwall. Bayard Taylor in 1877 
quoted the poet as saying to a fellow-author (perhaps Taylor himseK, 
who visited Farringford in 1857) that this was not characteristic of the 
scenery he had in mind, but that he could not change it because it had 
been published so long. {^International Review, IV, 402.) Yet pear 
came in 1863, and gable-wall in 1872. 

50 8. Grange : a large, isolated farm-house. 

50 13, 14. Cf. the fragment of Helvius Cinna's Smyrna, quoted by 
Servius on Georgics, i, 288 : — 

" Te matutinus flentem conspexit Eous, 
Et flentem paullo vidit post Hesperus idem." 

50 15. The sweet heaven: Shakespeare's expression. {Hamlet, iii, 
3, 45.) Cf. " Pelleas and Ettarre," 500. 

50 18. Trance : charm with a spell of silence. 

50 20. Cf. "A Fragment" (1831): "Looking athwart the burning 
flats." 

50 25. From Measure for Measure, iv, i, 35: "Upon the heavy 
middle of the night." Cf. Sappho, fragment 52 : — 

d^8vKe ixkv a aeXdwa 
Kai II\T]l.a5€S, fxiaat dk 
j/iJ/cres, Trapa 8' epxfT* wpa, 
eyu} 8^ jibva KaT€'u8u). — 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 353 

50 26. She heard the night- fowl crow : This is perhaps the cry of 
the water-fowl flying over in the night. The crowing of the cock is 
mentioned in the next line. 

51 31. Gray-eyed morn: Cf. Romeo aiid Juliet, ii, 3, i : "The grey- 
eyed morn smiles on the frowning night." Also, iii, 5, 19; Milton, 
" Lye," 26 ; and Tourneur, The Atheist's Tragedy, i, 3, " The gray-eyed 
morning." 

51 40. Marish-mosses : Cf. note on "The Dying Swan," 18. 

51 41. A poplar : not the Lombardy poplar, but the white poplar 
{Populus alba), the leaves of which are silvery on the under-side and in 
constant motion. Cf. In Mem., Ixxii, 3 : " blasts that blow the poplar 
white"; and Cowper, The Task, i, 310: — 

"And poplar that with silver lines his leaf." 

51 43. Mark: Darky^z& the reading until 1845. 

51 54. Wild winds bound within their cell : See Virgil, Aen., \, 

52-54- 

52 62 ff. Cf. " Guinevere," 69 ff. 

52 63. In took the place in 1851 of i\ The Une had been ridi- 
culed by Bulwer-Lytton in The New Timon (1845). This change indi- 
cates Tennyson's habit of removing apparent affectations and awkward 
elisions from his early work. Contrast, in this respect, Browning's 
habit. 

52 64. Cf. Maud, I, vi, 70, " the shrieking rush of the wainscot 
mouse." 

52 78. Thick-moted sunbeam : Cf. Chaucer, " Wyf of Bathes Tale," 
868, "As thikke as motes in the sonne beem" ; and Milton, "II Pen.," 
7, 8. 

52 80. In 1830: Downsloped was westering in his bower. Cf. 
" Lycidas," 31: — 

" The star that rose at evening bright 
Toward heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel." 

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN (Page 53) 

Printed in 1833, and repeatedly revised in successive editions. It is 
alluded to toward the end of 183 1 by Hallam, who thought that it "should 
be published soon, for it would estabhsh the poet at once in general 
reputation." {Mem., I, 82.) The inspiration came avowedly from 
Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, in which Love and Alcestis appear 



354 NOTES 

to the poet in a dream and, in punishment for the despite he had done 
to ladies in The Ro7naiint of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, lay this 
command upon him : — 

" Thou Shalt, whyl that thou livest, yeer by yere, 

The moste party of thy lyve spende 

In making of a glorious Legends 

Of Gode Wemen, maidenes and wyves, 

That were trewe in lovinge al hir lyves; 

And telle of false men that hem bitrayen." 

"Whereupon awaking the poet immediately applies himself to tell 
the stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucretia, 
Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. A similar poem, 
which preserves the framework of a vision, is Petrarch's Trionfo 
d' Amove. Tennyson's innovation is the dramatic manner in which he 
presents the legends, by allowing the characters to reveal themselves 
in speech. 

The poem is written in iambic quatrains with interwoven rhyme. 
The first three lines have five stresses each, and the fourth has three 
stresses. It is therefore one of those " broken staves " which came into 
fashion in English poetry during the latter half of the sixteenth century 
(Guest's History of English Rhyth?ns^ ed. W. W. Skeat, p. 573), and in 
which relief from the monotony of stanzas with equal lines is obtained 
by reducing the number of accents in one or more of the lines, usually 
the last. In " A Dream of Fair Women " the regularity of the rhythm 
is varied also by the overflow from one stanza to another in eighteen 
instances. There are fourteen approximate rhymes (18-20, 46-48, 
65-67, 117-119, 133-135, 138-140, 150-152, 194-196, 206-208, 209-211, 
214-216, 221-223, 253-255, 262-264), two echo rhymes (245-247, 
274-276), one lame rhyme (22-24) and one assonant rhyme (125-127), 
out of 144. A fine effect is occasionally brought about by trans- 
posing the stress in the third bar, as, e.g., in 1. 21. 

The " Dream " was originally introduced by the following stanzas : — 

As when a man, that sails in a balloon, 
Downlooking sees the solid shining ground 

Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon, — 
Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound : 

And takes his flags and waves them to the mob, 
That shouts below, all faces turned to where 

Glows rubylike the far-up crimson globe, 
Filled with a finer air: 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 355 

So, lifted high, the Poet at his will 

Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, 

Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still, 
Selfpoised, nor fears to fall. 

Hearing apart the echoes of his fame. 

While I spoke thus, the seedsman, memory. 
Sowed my deepfurrowed thought with many a name. 

Whose glory will not die. 

Fitzgerald thought these lines in Tennyson's " best style : no fretful 
epithet, nor a word too much." {Letters, Dec. 7, 1832.) But as he him- 
self pointed out, " they make a perfect poem by themselves without 
affecting the ' dream.' " And besides being irrelevant, they are strangely 
prosaic ; an inflated balloon would make a poor substitute for Pegasus. 
53 3. The morning-star of song : Cf. Denham, " On Mr. Abraham 
Cowley : his Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets," 1,2: — 

" Old Chaucer, like the morning star, 
To us discovers day from far." 

And see Hallam's Remains, p. 133. 

53 5. Dan: master, OF abbreviation of Latin doniimis. In Becket, 
John of Salisbury is called Dan John. Spenser first applied it to 
Chaucer. (/'. Q., iv, 2, st. 32.) " Dan Chaucer, well of English 
undefyled." Cf. vii, 7, st. 9. 

53 16. After this in 1833 came these two stanzas: — 

In every land I thought that, more or less, 

The stronger sterner nature overbore 
The softer, uncontrolled by gentleness 

And selfish evermore : 

And whether there were any means whereby 

In some far aftertime, the gentler mind 
Might reassume its just and full degree 

Of rule among mankind. 

They are interesting as an early approach to the theme of The Princess, 
but they, too, delayed the progress of the poem. 

53 18. The hollow dark : From Paradise Lost, ii, 953. 

53 23. Pass'd (1842) replaced screamed (1833). The poet's art had 
become more restrained. 

54 27. Tortoise : in Roman warfare, the covering made by a close 
body of soldiers, who interlocked their shields above their heads ; Latin, 
testudo. So Dryden, Aeneid, ii, 601. 



356 NOTES 

54 33-36: See Dickens's letter in Forster's Life, Aug. 7, 1842: "I 
have been reading Tennyson all this morning on the seashore. , . . 
Who else could conjure up such a close to the extraordinary and, as 
Landor would say, ' most wonderful ' series of pictures in the ' Dream 
of Fair Women ' as 

Squadrons and squares, etc. ? " 

54 43, 44. Cf. the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 43-45. 

55 54. An old wood : " the image of the past," as Palgrave says, 
like Dante's " selva oscura." {Inf., i, 2.) Fresh-wash' d in coolest dew : 
Milton, " L' Al.," 22, " Fresh-blow^n roses washed in dew." 

55 56. Shook : Cf. " Of old sat Freedom," 3, and Hi Mem., 
Epilogue, 31, " The star that shook." 
55 67. Gross darkness : Isaiah, Ix, 2. 
55 69-70. Growths — arms: The 1833 reading was: — 

Clasping jasmine turned 
Its twined arms. 

The change (1842) makes the line more musical and less redundant. 

55 71. Lush: luxuriant. Cf. Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii, i, 52. 

55 76. Lawn : glade, or open place in a forest, as in Paradise Lost, 
iv, 252. 

55 77-80. Cf. the "Song" in the 1833 volume: — 

Who can tell 

Why to smell 

The violet, recalls the dewy prime 

Of youth and buried time? 

The cause is nowhere found in rhyme. 

The pansy affected Wordsworth in this way. (" Ode on the Intimations 
of Immortality," 55.) 

56 84. End of time : See Rev. x, 6. 

56 85. A lady : Helen, wife of Menelaus, beguiled away by Paris, 
son of Priam ; the cause of the Trojan War. 

56 87. Divinely tall: Cf. 1. 102. To the Greek, stature was the 
invariable accompaniment of beauty, and a mark of the Olympian 
deities. See Aristotle, Nic. Eth., iv, 3, § 2 : " Beauty exists only with 
good stature ; for little persons may be pretty and well proportioned, 
but cannot be beautiful." Cf. Rhetoric, i, 5, 6; Homeric Hymn to 
Apollo, 198; Odyssey, xiii, 289, et passim; Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 
V, I, 5. In "The Mystic" (1830) Tennyson had called the hours 
" Daughters of time, divinely tall." 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 357 

56 97, 98. Cf. Iliad, iii, 156-158; and Marlowe, Faushcs, sc. xvii, 
31-32 (Temple Edition) : — 

" No marvel though the angry Greeks pursued 
With ten years' war the rape of such a queen." 

These are all admirable instances of " description by effect." 

56 101. She : Iphigenia. Artemis, offended at Agamemnon for 
killing a sacred hind, took revenge by becalming the Greek fleet which 
had gathered at Aulis, on the Boeotian coast, to sail against Troy. 
Calchas the seer declared that the goddess could be appeased only by 
the sacrifice of the king's daughter, Iphigenia. The heroes present 
at the sacrifice thought that she was actually killed, and the incident is 
so described by Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 183-248, and Lucretius, i, 
84-100. Tennyson seems to have had these authors in mind, at least 
in his first version of the passage. But the Greek legend also tells us 
that at the moment of sacrifice, Artemis substituted a hind for the 
maiden, and carried her off in a cloud to the land of the Tauri. See 
Euripides, Iphigenia at Aitlis, passim, esp. 1 544-1 589. Averse: like 
Dido, in the Aeneid (iv, 362 ; vi, 469). 

56 104. For Iphigenia's hatred of Helen, see Euripides, Iphigenia 
in Tatiris, 356. 

56 106. Until 1884 the line read. Which yet to na7ne my spirit 
loathes and fears. Iron years : Alluding to the grimness of the " Iron 
Age." Cf. Dryden, VirgiPs Pastorals, ix, 16, "these hard iron times." 

56 107. Cf. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 1 547-1 550: "But when 
king Agamemnon saw the maiden on her way to the grove to be sacri- 
ficed, he gave one groan, and, turning away his face, let the tears burst 
from his eyes, as he held his robe before them." There was a famous 
painting of the scene by Timanthes, to which Cicero refers in his 
Orator, 79. The incident is alluded to in Becket, iii, 3, 84. 

57 113-116. Until 1853 these lines read: — 

The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat, 
The temples and the people and the shore. 

One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat 
Slowly, — and nothing more. 

Lockhart said of this : " What touching simplicity — what pathetic 
resignation — he cut my throat — ' nothing more ! ' One might indeed 
ask, ' what more she would have ? ' " The emendation is one of 
Tennyson's best. The ridiculous suggestion is removed, the story is 
told so as not to contradict flatly the legend that Iphigenia was saved, 



358 NOTES 

and the brilliant metonymy of " the bright death," and .the faiUng 
consciousness impUed in the change from the first to the third person 
reveal a master-hand. With " the bright death " compare the Latin 
use of mors for " deadly weapon." (Sihus Italicus, ix, 368, 9, " per 
pectora saevas Exceptat mortes " ; Statins, Thebaid, vi, 792, " mille 
caret lapsas circum cava tempora mortes " ; Lucan, vii, 517.) 

57 118-120. Cf. Iliad, iii, 173, 174. Gladstone makes Helen a type 
of almost Christian repentance. {^Juvenilis Mundi, p. 508.) 

57 126. One: Cleopatra, about w^hom Tennyson as a boy had written 
some verses in Poems by Two Brothers. Thomas Love Peacock {Gryll 
Grange, ch. xxiii) found fault with the description in 1. 127, on the 
ground that it fitted " the Queen of Bambo," and not a pure Greek, 
the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes and a lady of Pontus. But why should 
the line mean more than that Cleopatra was a brunette .-* (Cf. 1. 15S.) 
Or, if more is meant, then Shakespeare is responsible for her appear- 
ance as well as her character. {^Antony and Cleopatra, i, 5, 28: "me 
That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black.") 

57 128. Brow-bound: So Shakespeare, Coriohnms, ii, 2, 102. 

57 130. Change: Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 2, 240, 241. 

57 132-134. Cf. The Witch of Edmonton, by Rowley, Dekker, and 
Ford, ii, 2. 

" You are the powerful moon of my blood's sea, 
To make it ebb or flow into my face, 
As your looks change." 

58 1.^9. Caesar: not Julius, whom she did tame, but Octavius. 

58 14]-]. ".6. \\\ place of these four stanzas the editions of 1833 and 
1842 have : — 

" By him great Pompey dwarfs and suffers pain, 

A mortal man before immortal Mars ; 
The glories of great Julius lapse and wane, 

And shrink from suns to stars. 

" That man, of all the men I Qver knew. 

Most touched my fancy. O f what days and nlglits 

We had in Egypt, ever reaping new 
Harvest of ripe delights, 

" Realmdraining revels ! Life was one long feast. 

What wit! what words! what sweet words, only made 
Less sweet by the kiss that broke 'em, liking best 

To be so richly stayed ! 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 359 

" What dainty strifes, when fresh from war's alarms, 

My Hercules, my gallant Antony, 
My mailed captain leapt into my arms. 

Contented there to die ! 

"And in those arms he died: I heard my name 
Sigh'd forth with life: then I shook off all fear: 

Oh what a little snake stole Caesar's fame ! 
What else was left ? look here ! " 

(With that she tore her robe, etc. 

LI. 141-144 were introduced in 1843; ^l- 145-148 in 1845, leading in 

1843: — 

What nights we had in Egypt! I could hit 

His humours while I crossed them: O the life 

I led him, and the dalliance and the wit. 

The flattery and the strife. 

LI. 149-153 came in 1843 ! ^l- '54' '55 i" '845' the 1843 version being — 

Sigh'd forth with life I had no further fear, 
O what a little worm stole Caesar's fame ! 

The way in which Tennyson wrote and rewrote this passage affords 
excellent opportunity for the study of his poetical and critical methods. 
The result of all the polishing is to make the art seem too premeditated, 
but this is compensated by the increased passion and concentration, 
the local truth imparted by such words as " Nilus," " Libyan Sun," and 
" Canopus," the subtle suggestion of character in " Bacchus," etc. 

58 14]. Rode sublime: from Milton, Par. Lost, vi, 771, or Gray, 
" Progress of Poesy," 95. 

58 145, 146. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, i, 4, 5 ; ii, 2, 182; ii, 5, 21. 

58 146. Canopus : Alpha Argo, a star of the southern hemisphere, 
only half a magnitude fainter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. 
Pliny notes that it is conspicuous at Alexandria. {Nat. Hist., ii, 71.) 
Cf. Manilius, Astrono?nica, i, 216, 217 (" Nusquam invenies fulgere 
Canopum Donee Niliacas per pontum veneris oras "), and Lucan 
viii, 181. 

58 150. Hercules : Antony claimed to be descended from Hercules, 
and imitated him in his dress. See Plutarch, Life of Antonius, 4, and 
cf. Antony and Cleopatra, i, 3, 84; iv, 12, 44. 

58 151, 152. See Antony and Cleopatra, iv, 8, 13-16; iv, 15, 18-21, 
38-40. Bacchus: Plutarch says {Ant., 25, 60) that he was called "the 
new Bacchus " because he followed the god in his ways. 



360 NOTES 

58 155. The other : Octavius. 

58 161 ff. Cf. Horace, Odes, i, 37, 31. 

59 165. Voice, a lyre : See Plutarch, Ant., 27, " Her tongue was an 
instrument of music to divers sports and pastimes, the which she easily 
turned to any language that pleased her." 

59 166. Struck: In 1833 and 1842: Touched. 

59 177. Undazzled : recovered from its dazed condition ; a verb of 
Tennyson's coinage. 

59 178. Some one : Jephtha's daughter, for whose story {^Judges, xi, 
26-40) Tennyson had a predilection. ( The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 257.) 
Cf. "Aylmer's Field," 280, and "The Flight," 26; also, Byron's "Jephtha's 
Daughter." 

59 179. Crested bird: So also Ovid of the cock, "cristatus ales." 
{Fasti, i, 455.) 

60 211. Threefold cord: Cf. Ecclesiastes, iv, 12. 

60 213 ff. \n Judges, xi, 38, Jephtha's daughter retires to the moun- 
tains with her companions to bewail her virginity, for it was a shame to 
the Hebrew woman if she died without a man-child. See Genesis, xxx, 
23 ; Ltike, i, 25. 

61 222. From: 1833-1851 : in. 

61 225. Cf. Horace, Odes, i, 34, 5, 6 : — 

" Diespiter 
Igni corusco nubila dividens." 

Tennyson uses the same expression of a sound in Maud, i, i, 16. 
61 226. The everlasting hills : Cf. Genesis, xlix, 26. 
61 238. Hip and thigh : Cf . Judges, xv, 8. 

61 243. Thridding: threading. Cf. Princess, iv, 242; In Mem., 
xcvii, 21. Boskage: thicket. Spelled "boscage" in "Sir John Old- 
castle," 122. 

62 251. Rosamond : the mistress of Henry II. See the Ballad (161 1) 
in Percy's Reliques, and Tennyson's romantic drama, Becket. Her story 
is thus told in the Chronicle of John Stow (i 580) : " Rosamund the fayre 
daughter of Walter, lord CUfford, . . . (poisoned by queen Eleanor, as 
some thought) dyed at Woodstocke [a.d. 1176] where king Henry had 
made for her a house of wonderf ull working ; so that no man or woman 
might come to her, but he that was instructed by the king, or such as 
were right secret with him touching the matter. This house after some 
was named Labyrinthus, or Dedalus worke, which was wrought like a 
knot in a garden, called a Maze ; but it was commonly said that lastly 



A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN 361 

the queene came to her by a clue of thridde, or silke, and so dealt with 
her, that she lived not long after." 

62 259. Fulvia: Antony's first wife and the object of Cleopatra's 
fierce jealousy {Antony and Cleopatra, i, scs. i, 2, 3) is substituted by her 
for Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wife of Rosamond's royal lover. 

62 263. The captain of my dreams : Venus, the morning star. 
" The goddess of love and beauty may well enough be called the cap- 
tain — the leader or inspirer — of the poet's dream of fair women." 
(Rolfe, confirmed by Tennyson.) 

62 266, 267. In 1833: — 

Ere I saw her, that in her latest trance 
Clasped her dead father's heart, or Joan of Arc. 

Her: Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, and one of 
the most learned and delightful ladies of her age. When her father 
was executed (1535), his head was displayed on London Bridge. Sta- 
pleton (1588) says that it was privately purchased by Margaret within a 
month of its exposure, and preserved in spices till her death in 1544, 
when it was buried with her in Chelsea Church. Modern historians 
question the truth of this. See The Life of Blessed Thomas More, by 
Father T. E. Bridgett, pp. 435 ff. 

62 269. Her: Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I of England. 
The story here alluded to is now generally discredited, though defended 
by Sir Edward Creasy. {History of England, I, 378.) It is first noticed, 
as a mere report, by Ptolomaeus Lucensis (d. 1327 ?) in his Ecclesiastical 
History, and is told by the Spaniard Sanctius (d. 1470 ?) in a commentary 
on Roderigo Toletus. At the siege of Acre (1272) Edward w^as stabbed 
in the arm by a secret agent of the Old Man of the Mountains. The 
wound began to mortify, and it w^as feared that the dagger had been 
poisoned. The foreign historians above mentioned say that Eleanor 
immediately apphed her lips to the spot and sucked the blood until the 
surgeons were ready. The English chroniclers, on the contrary, assert 
that it was necessary to carry her from the room, so wild did she become 
at the crisis. See Camden's Remains, Strickland's English Queens, and 
The Dictionary of National Biography. Sir Walter Scott adapted the 
incident to the plot of The Talisman (ch. xxi). 



362 NOTES 

SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE (Page 63) 

Published in 1842, but partly if not wholly written in 1830. {Mem., II, 
122.) Some verses were handed about at Cambridge, says Edward 
Fitzgerald. {Mem., I, 59.) The incident which forms the theme of this 
fragment is the one referred to so often in the Idylls, Lancelot's escort 
of Guinevere to her wedding with King Arthur, (See " The Coming 
of Arthur," 446-451, " Balin and Balan," 264-268, " Merlin and Vivien," 
134, " Guinevere," 377-397.) This is an innovation of Tennyson's, for, 
in Malory, iii, i. Merlin is the envoy. It would seem that the poet had 
intended to tell the whole tragedy of Guinevere, as he did that of Elaine 
in " The Lady of Shalott," but found the story too long and intricate 
for a ballad. For the scenery and costume, cf. Malory, xviii, 25, How 
true love is likened to summe)', and xix, i. How Queen Guenever rode 
a-Mayingwith certain knights of the Round Table and clad all in green ; 
also, in the Idylls, " Merlin and Vivien," 85-95, ^"^ " Guinevere," 
21-23. 

The metre is iambic four-stressed. The stress is frequently trans- 
posed at the beginning of the line. The last line of the stanza has but 
three stresses ; it rhymes with the fifth line ; the first four lines rhyme 
together, and the sixth, seventh, and eighth. Notice the variations from 
this form in " The Lady of Shalott." In 1. 34, " warblings " is trisyllabic, 
according to a practice not uncommon in Shakespeare. (Cf. " ta.cklings," 
in 3 Henry VI, v, 4, 18.) 

63 8. Elm-tree (1853). 1 842-1 851 : linden. The English elm is 
a more towering tree than the linden. 

63 10. The linnet piped his song: Cf. In Mem., xxi, 24. 

64 20. Launcelot : Elsewhere in Tennyson " Lancelot," though 
" Launcelot " occurred in the original print of " The Lady of Shalott," 
and three times in Enid and Nimu'e (1857). See Jones, Growth of the 
Idylls, p. 63. 

64 30. In mosses mixt (1853). 1842-1850: On mosses thick. 1851: 
In mosses thick. The revised phrase is truer: the violets were inter- 
spersed. 

64 31. Pastern: the part of the foot between the fetlock-joint and 
the coronet of the hoof. 

64 32. And fleeter now (1853). 1842-1851 : And no7v jnore fleet. 

64 33 ff. This is either a reminiscence of Carlyle, or else Carlyle 
and Tennyson had a common source. Cf. Essay on Goethe's Helena 



THE LADY OF SHALOTT 363 

(1828) : — " Sorry are we that we cannot follow him through these fine 
warblings and trippings on the light fantastic toe : to our ears there is 
a quick, pure, small-toned music in them, as perhaps of elfin-bells when 
the Queen of Faery rides by moonlight." 

THE LADY OF SHALOTT (Page 65) 

This poem is mentioned in the Memoir, I, 82, and apparently belongs 
to 1 83 1. It was published in 1833, and practically rewritten for the 
reprint of 1842. The story of Lancelot and Elaine (cf. the Idyll of 
that name, and Malory, xviii, 9-20) is here treated lyrically and mystic- 
ally. According to Palgrave, the source was "an Italian romance 
upon the Donna di Scalotta, in w'hich Camelot, unlike the Celtic tra- 
dition, was placed near the sea." This romance may be safely identified 
with novella Ixxxi of the famous Cento Novelle Antiche (Gualteruzzi's 
edition), ' Qui conta come la Damigella di Scalot mori per amore di 
Lancialotto de Lac,' which fulfils the condition of the situation of 
Camelot, mentions the Lady's crown and girdle (as in the first version), 
and speaks of the barons and knights running out of the palace and 
standing mute with astonishment at the strange vessel. (See Modern 
Language Notes, December 1902.) This story was referred to as the 
' Lady of Scalot ' in Dunlop's History of Fiction (1814), ch. vii, and was 
translated by Thomas Roscoe in his Italian Novelists (1825), I, pp. 45, 46. 
Tennyson may possibly have seen Roscoe's translation. Some sugges- 
tions surely came from Spenser. The key to the allegory, says Hallam 
Tennyson {Mem., I, 116), is in 11. 69-72. 'The poet gave the following 
interpretation to Canon Ainger : " The new-bom love for something, 
for some one in the wide w^orld from which she has been so long^ 
secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities." J 
See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 323. Almost every characteristic of th'e 
pre-Raphaelite poetry is here foreshadowed. 

The metre is a variation on that of " Sir Launcelot and Queen 
CTuinevere," effected by making the rhyme-words of the fifth and ninth 
hues constant in all the stanzas, with a pause after the fifth. See 
Schipper, EngliscJie Metrik, II, 598. The short syllable before the 
first stress is frequently omitted, e.g., in 11. 7, 19, 20, 21, 39, etc. 
In some verses the movement is distinctly changed to the trochaic, 
e.g., 10-17, -8-36, 144-148. Echo rhymes: 105-107, 145-148. False 
rhyme : 105-106. 

65 3. Wold : down, or open tract of rolUng land. 



364 NOTES 

66 5. Camelot : the legendary capital of Arthur's kingdom, some- 
times identified with Queen-Camel in Somerset. See introductory note. 
65 6-9. In 1833 these lines read: — 

The yellowleaved waterlily, 
The greensheathed daffodilly, 
Tremble in the water chilly. 
Round about Shalott. 

The daffodil is not a water plant. 

65 9. Shalott : apparently Tennyson's softening of the Italian form 
of Astolat. Escalot is the French form. (See the Prose Lancelot, 
pt. iv.) According to Malory (xviii, 8) it is the modern Guildford in 
Surrey, though Rhys thinks it was Alclut, the old Welsh name for the 
rock of Dumbarton in the Clyde. {The Art/unian Legend, p. 393.) 

65 10-12. In 1833: — 

— aspens shiver. 
The sunbeam-showers break and quiver 
In the stream that runneth ever, etc. 

65 10. Willows whiten : The silvery underside of the leaves is 
turned by the wind. See The Foetjy of Tennyson, p. 322. Aspens 
quiver: Cf. "A Farewell," 10; "Lancelot and Elaine," 522. 

65 11, 12. These lines describe exactly the effect of light puffs of air 
on flowing water. Cf. Homer's fi^Xaiva <f)pl^ {Lliad, xxi, 126), Virgil's 
"inhorruit unda tenebris" {Aen., iii, 195), and Horace's " asp era Nigris 
aequora ventis" {Odes, i, 5, 6). For dusk as a verb, cf. Chaucer, 
" Knightes Tale," 1948, " Dusked hise eyen two." 

66 19, 36. These two stanzas originally stood : — 

Underneath the bearded barley, 
The reaper, reaping late and early, 
Hears her ever chanting cheerly, 
Like an angel, singing clearly, 

O'er the stream of Camelot. 
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy, 
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary 
Listening whispers, " 't is the fairy 

Lady of Shalott." 

The little isle is all inrailed 
With a rose-fence, and overtrailed 
With roses: by the marge unbailed 
The shallop flitteth silkensailed. 

Skimming down to Camelot. 



THE LADY OF SHALOTT 365 



A pearlgarland winds her head : 
She leaneth on a velvet bed, 
Full royally apparelled, 

The Lady of Shalott. 

The revision of the third stanza (the fourth in 1833) shows typically 
Tennyson's increasing interest in the things of the mind over the things 
of sense. Instead of a luscious description of garden and apparel, he 
gives us the contrast between the outer world of activity and the Lady's 
self-centred solitude. 

66 22. Silken-saiPd : Cf. " Recollections of the Arabian Nights," 2. 

66 37-40. In 1833: — 

No time hath she to sport and play: 
A charmed web she weaves alway. 
A curse is on her, if she stay 
Her weaving, either night or day, etc. 

The web and the mirror (1. 46) are in no other known version of the 
story of Lancelot and Elaine. The former is represented in the Idyll 
(7-12) by the case which Elaine embroiders for Lancelot's shield, — 
developed by Tennyson from Malory's simple words (xviii, 14), "It is 
in my chamber, covered with a case." 

66 43. And so in 1842 replaced Therefore (1833). 

66 44. And little in 1842 replaced Therefore no (1833). 
66, 67 46-52. In 1833: — 

She lives with little joy or fear. 
Over the water, running near. 
The sheepbell tinkles in her ear. 
Before her hangs a mirror clear. 

Reflecting towered Camelot. 
And, as the mazy web she whirls, 
She sees the surly, etc. 

The revised form makes the symbolism plainer. (__The Lady is living in 
a dream-world, busied with her own thoughts. A mirror was used in 
tapestry-making to enable the weaver to see the effect of the stitches, 
but this mirror has greater virtue. Compare the story of the magic 
mirror made by Merlin, which imaged all the world, and in which 
Britomart saw the knight for whose love she nearly died. {Faerie 
Queene, iii, 2, 17-26.) And see W. S. Kennedy in Poet Lore, X, 492. 

67 56. Pad : a road horse. 



366 NOTES 

67 66. For often, etc, : The visions of human sorrow and love pass 
before her. She begins to feel that a dream-life cannot satisfy the 
heart. 

67 68. Went to in 1842 replaced came from (1833). 

68 78. A red-cross knight, etc. : Probably a reminiscence of 
Spenser's hero, for Lancelot's escutcheon is nowhere else so repre- 
sented. In " Lancelot and Elaine," 659, he carries blue shield-lions. 
This entire portrait should be compared for beauty and minuteness 
with that of Prince Arthur in the Faerie Queene, i, 7, st. 29-33. ^Or 
ever : So Keats of the pictured figures in his " Ode on a Grecian Urn," 
20, " For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! " 

68 86. To in 1842 replaced from (1833). So also in 11. 95, 104. 
The change has in mind Lancelot's appearance at Camelot at 
the end. 

68 98. Bearded : having a train or tail. Cf. Randolph, Muses' 
Looking- Glass, ii, 2 : " Let fooles gaze At bearded starres." 

68 99. Still in 1842 replaced ^r^^« (i833)> a bit of false colour: at 
night the green w^ould not be visible. 

68 103. His coal-black curls : In the old romances his hair is yel- 
low, like fine gold. See The Celtic Element in the Lady of Shalott. 
{Poet Lore, IV, 411.) 

68 107. In 1833: " Tirra lirra, tirra lirraP "Lirra" made a bad 
rhyme. Cf. Winter''s Tale, iv, 3, 9, " The lark that tirra-lirra chants." 

69 111. Water-lily in 1842 replaced waterflower (1833). 

69 114-116. /Love shatters the world of, "maiden meditation," and 
proves a fatal curse, because it is unrequited. ' 

69 118-121. An illustration of what Ruskin calls "the pathetic fal- 
lacy " {Modern Painters, vol. Ill, pt. IV, ch. xii), meaning thereby the 
fancied sympathy of Nature with human feeling. But the conscious- 
ness of this sympathy, at least as an element in our imaginative vision 
of Nature, marks the greatest poets. Cf. Paradise Lost, ix, 1002 ; 
Shakespeare, Sonnet xxxiii. 

69 123-126. In 1833: — 

Outside the isle a shallow boat 
Beneath a willow lay afloat, 
Below the carven stern she wrote, 
The Lady of Shalott. 

69 127-132. In 1833 this stanza was the third in Part IV, coming 
after the description of costume. 



THE LADY OF SHALOTT 367 

With a steady, stony glance — 
Like some bold seer in a trance, 
Beholding all his own mischance, 
Mute, with a glassy countenance — 
She looked down to Camelot. 
It was the closing, etc. 

69, 70 136-144. This was compressed in 1842, with great advance 
in. poetic dignity, from two stanzas, the second and fourth respectively 



A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight. 
All raimented in snowy white 
That loosely flew (her zone in sight, 
Clasped with one blinding diamond bright,) 

Her wide eyes fixed on Camelot, 
Though the squally eastwind keenly 
Blew, with folded arms serenely 
By the water stood the queenly 

Lady of Shalott. 



As when to sailors while they roam. 
By creeks and outfalls far from home, 
Rising and dropping with the foam, 
From dying swans wild warblings come, 

Blown shoreward; so to Camelot 
Still, etc. 



In 1. 143, singing replaced chanting, and last replaced death. 
70 145-148. In 1833: — 

A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy, 

She chanted loudly, chanted lowly. 

Till her eyes were darkened wholly. 

And her smooth face sharpened slowly, etc. 

On the last line, cf. " Death of the Old Year," 46. 
70 156-162. In 1833: — 

A pale, pale corpse she floated by, 
Deadcold between the houses high, 

Dead into towered Camelot. 
Knight and burgher, lord and dame, 
To the planked wharfage came: 
Below the stern they read her name, 

" The Lady of Shalott." 



368 NOTES 

This stanza (like the others) was changed to the present form in 1842, 
with the exception of 1. 157, which, from 1842 to and including 1853, 
had A corse for Dead-pale. 
70, 71 164-171. In 1833 : — 

They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, 
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire and guest. 
There lay a parchment on her breast, 
That puzzled more than all the rest. 

The wellfed wits at Camelot. 
" The web was woven curiously, 
The charm is broken utterly, 
Draw near and fear not — this is /, 

The Lady of ShalottP 

This conclusion was incongruously amusing and bewildering. The 
parchment corresponded to the letter which, in " Lancelot and Elaine," 
1262, the king finds in her hand. In the present form, 1. 168 is the 
only direct parallel with the Idyll. (Cf. 1. 1260.) The reintroduction 
of Lancelot deepens the pathos. The note, at the end, of regret for 
dead beauty is very much in the manner of Rossetti. 



THE MAY QUEEN (Page 71) 

The first two parts appeared in 1833. The " Conclusion " was added 
in 1842. In it the pathos of the situation is perhaps carried too 
far. Still, the general public has said with Carlyle, " Oh ! but that 's 
tender and true." {Mem., II, 234.) The scenery is Lincolnshire, and 
the language that of the Lincolnshire peasant refined, almost to the 
exclusion of dialect, for the uses of poetry. Compare Wordsworth's 
pastoral manner. (Lyall, Tennyson, p. 119.) A may-pole dance was 
held at Horncastle, the early home of Lady Tennyson, up to fifty years 
ago. (J. C. Walters, In Tejinyson Land, p. 24.) 

The metre is that of the old rhymed Septenary (as seen, e.g., in 
Byron's " There 's not a joy the world can give "), with many variations. 
(Gummere, p. 182 ff.) Thirty-two fines have but six stresses ; 1. 41 has 
eight, unless the initial " So " is quite extra-metrical. The transposed 
stress is common in the fourth bar (e.g., 1. 3), and the fourth-line refrain 
of Part I has this " trochaic substitution " in both the fourth bar and 
the fifth. Sometimes (e.g., in 46, 49, 95) the light syllable of the fourth 



THE MAY QUEEN 369 

bar is omitted, being compensated by a pause. Extra-syllables are 
numerous (e.g., 1. 39). The regular place of the cassural pause — after 
the fourth bar — is by no means rigorously adhered to. This rapid 
couplet is perhaps better adapted to the gaiety of Part I than to 
the sadness of Parts II and III, but the metre is one that lends 
itself, with singular flexibility, to all kinds of emotion. There are two 
approximate rhymes : 77-78, 153-154. 
71 2. Glad replaced in 1842 blythe. 

71 14. Robin, the original reading, was replaced by Robert in 1842, 
but restored in 1843. 

72 30. Cuckoo-flowers: a name given to various wild flowers in 
bloom when the cuckoo sings ; here the Lady's Smock {Cardamine 
pratensis), common in meadows. At Somersby they are "just scarce 
enough to make children care to gather them." (Rawnsley, p. 19.) 
Cf. "Margaret," 8, and "The Miller's Daughter" (1S33 version), "the 
silver-paly cuckoo flower." 

72 31. Marsh-marigold : the common name for Caltha palustris, 
which has golden flowers. 

73 52. The blossom on in 1S42 replaced The may upon (1833). 
" May" belongs specifically to the flower of the hawthorn. (Cf. " Guin- 
evere," 22.) The blackthorn is in blossom at the end of April and 
the first of May. 

73 56. Charles's Wain : the Great Bear. 

74 62. The tufted plover : the green plover or peewit ( Vanellus 
cristatus) has a mobile crest, and its shrill cry is often heard on moonlit 
nights in spring. 

74 72. Oat-grass: Several oat-like grasses are so called; here 
probably Avena pratensis. Sword-grass : Phalaris arundinacea ; or 
perhaps Poa aquatica, which has very sharp-edged leaves, is here 
intended. 

74 73. You in 1842, here and elsewhere in the poem, replaced Ye. 

74 78. And forgive me ere I go replaced in 1850 upo7i my cheek and 
brow, to the detriment of the rhyme. 

75 93. Before the day is born replaced in 1842 wheit it begins to 
dawn, to the improvement of the rhyme. 

76 106. His will be done: Cf. Matt., vi, 10. 
76 107, 108. Replaced in 1843: — 

But still it can't be long, mother, before I find release; 

And that good man, the clergyman, he preaches words of peace. 



370 NOTES 

76 113. From 1842 to 184S: He showed ?fte all the mercy, for he 
taught me all the sin. In 1850 : He taught me all the mercy, for show'd 
he tne all the sin. Present reading in 1851. 

76 114. See Matt., xxv, 1-13. 

76 117. Death-watch : an insect which makes a noise hke the ticking 
of a watch, supposed by the superstitious to portend death. 

76 118. When the night and morning meet: Collins compares 
David Mallet's " William and Margaret," i, 2: — 

" 'T was at the silent, solemn hour, 
When night and morning meet." 

77 134. Come in 1889 replaced conies; one of Tennyson's last 
corrections. 

77 142. A was inserted in 1875. 

77 146. See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 325. 

77 156. Quoted from fob, iii, 17. See The Poetry of Tennyson, 
p. 251. 

IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL (Page 78) 

Published in Ballads (1880). This true story was called to Tenny- 
son's attention by Mary Gladstone, daughter of the Prime Minister, 
says the Memoir (II, 253). It seems probable that the poet also 
saw the narrative as it appeared, under the title Alice's Christmas 
Day, either in St. Cyprian's Banner (December 1872) or in JVew and 
Old (III, 289-291), two parochial magazines. (See N. and Q., Sixth 
Series, III, p. 85.) According to Tennyson, " the two children are the 
only characters, in this little dramatic poem, taken from life." But 
Alice's Christmas Day is told by " Sister Lydia," a nurse strikingly like 
the one in the poem, and the characters of the two doctors are dimly 
suggested. The poet shows his genius as much in what he omits and 
changes as in what he adopts and develops. Some of the points of 
likeness and unlikeness are noted below. Palgrave says, " This is the 
most absolutely pathetic poem known to me." 

The flexible measure inclines towards the anapaestic ; it has six 
accents, and from thirteen to eighteen syllables to the line. The 
strophes vary in length from two to sixteen lines. The rhymes are in 
couplets, and none of them is defective. Cf. " Rizpah." 

78 1-10. The fact that this is a dramatic lyric and that the narrator 
speaks in character was, at first, missed by some readers of the poem, 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL 371 

who interpreted it as Tennyson's personal attack upon modern surgery. 
See Mem,, II, 498. 

78 9, 10. This allusion to the anti-vivisection agitation shows 
how closely Tennyson's poetry reflects the feelings of the age. Cf. 
The Princess, iii, 293. Compare Browning's opinion in " Tray " and 
" Arcades Ambo." Oorali : a virulent poison (the aqueous extract of 
Strychnos toxiferd) from South America, which destroys the power 
of motion without affecting sensation ; spelled also curari, ourari, 
wouraly, etc. 

79 23 ff. Tennyson believes in the progress of humanity, but thinks 
the goal is far away. Cf. " Locksley Hall," 137, 138, The Frijicess, 
Conclusion, 77-79, In Memoriai7i, Epilogue, 143, 144, " Locksley 
Hall Sixty Years After," passim, " The Dawn," " The Making of 
Man," etc. 

79 26. See Matt., xxv, 40. 

79 28 ff. Tennyson's poetic version of the following commonplace 
passage : " I soon grew very fond of most of the children, but among 
them all I think little Alice most won my love ; she was so young and 
weak to bear the terrible pain she suffered, and she was so sweet and 
patient under it ; no one ever heard her say a cross or fretful word." 
{New and Old, III, p. 289.) 

79 30. A sensitive plant : a leguminous plant {Mimosa pudica, or 
M. sensitivd), the leaves of which close at the slightest touch. 

80 37. Spirits in prison : Cf . i Peter, iii, 1 9. 

80 50. See Matt., xix, 14. In the original it is the Hospital 
chaplain who tells her that the Lord Jesus loves little children. The 
change allows compression and the hint of a moral. 

81 56. In Mary Gladstone's letter this expedient is suggested by 
" Annie " as here, but in New and Old it comes from Emmie [Alice] 
herself : " Suddenly Alice exclaimed, ' Polly ! [i.e. Annie] what shall 
we do, we have forgotten one thing ! If our Blessed Lord comes to 
help me to-morrow, how will He know which is Alice among so many 
children ? . . , I know what I will do, Polly ; when I go to sleep 
I will leave my arm hanging down out of bed, and I will tell Him 
that it is the little girl with her arm hanging down who wants Him to 
help her, and then He will know, and will not let the doctors hurt 
me ' " (p. 290). 

81 64. Nature here reechoes the human feeling. 



3/2 NOTES 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (Page 82) 

Early on Oct. 25, 1854, the Crimean war having been about a month 
in progress, the Russian army advanced to threaten Balaclava, the 
allies' base of supplies. Their cavalry was checked by the charge of 
the Heavy Brigade up the Causeway Heights, which divide in two the 
plain above the town. (See the next poem.) At about eleven o'clock 
the Light Brigade, consisting of the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, the 
8th and nth Hussars, and the 17th Lancers, and numbering 673 men, 
was ordered to charge a Russian battery at the opposite end of the 
northern section of the valley, a mile and a half away. The order was 
evidently an error, and the blame was at first laid upon Captain Nolan, 
who delivered the message from headquarters to the commander of the 
cavalry division. Lord Lucan ; but Kinglake gives the weight of respon- 
sibility to Lucan himself. The charge was made with the most splendid 
gallantry, only 195 men surviving. (A. W. Kinglake, The Invasion of 
the Crimea, Harper & Bros., 1875, ^I' PP- 478-586.) Tennyson said, in 
a footnote to the original publication, that his poem " was written after 
reading the first report of the ' Ti7nes'' correspondent, where only 607 
sabres are mentioned as having taken part in the charge." This report 
was printed on Nov, 14, 1854; the main source of suggestion was, how- 
ever, an editorial in the same paper on the day before : " The whole 
brigade advanced at a trot for more than a mile, down a valley, with a 
murderous flank fire of Minie muskets and shells from hills on both 
sides. It charged batteries, took guns, sabred the gunners, and charged 
the Russian cavalry beyond; but, . . ..being attacked by cavalry in 
front and rear, it had to cut its way through them, and return through 
the same cavalry and the same fire. . . . The British soldier will do 
his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he 
is the victim of some hideous blunder. Whatever the case of the com- 
mon soldier, and however little he might know the full horrors of his 
position till death had done its work all around him, the officers who 
led him on . . . knew well what they were about. . . . Splendid as 
the event was on the Alma, yet that rugged ascent , . . was scarcely 
so glorious as the progress of the cavalry through and through that 
valley of death, with a murderous fire, not only in front, but on both 
sides, above, and even in the rear." 

The poem was written in a few minutes on Dec. 2, 1854. {Mem., I, 
381.) It was first printed in The Examiner on December 9, in seven 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE 



373 



strophes, of which the first, fourth, sixth, and seventh are the same as 
the present i (first four hnes), iii, v, and vi, respectively. Its second 
strophe is as follows : — 

Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred, 
For up came an order which 

Some one had blunder'd. 

* Forward, the Light Brigade ! 

* Take the guns,' Nolan said : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 

The present 1. lo was originally No man was there dismay' d, but the 
rest of the third strophe was the same as the present ii. The fifth was 
the same as iv, except that all at 07tce originally stood for as they turned 

(1. 28), and 

With many a desperate stroke 
The Russian line they broke; 

was the original reading of 11. 33-36. In 1. 45, Those stood originally 
for They, and in 1. 46 from for thro\ 

At the criticism of some friends, it was revised and printed in Maud, 
and Other Poems, 1855, as follows: — 



Half a league, half a league, 

Half a league onward, 
All in the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 
" Charge," was the captain's cry ; 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs but to do and die, 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 



(Same as the present iii) 

3 

Flash'd all their sabres bare, 
Flash'd all at once in air, 
Sabring the gunners there, 



374 NOTES 

Charging an army, while 

All the world wonder'd: 
Plunged in the battery-smoke 
Fiercely the line they broke; 
Strong was the sabre-stroke; 
Making an army reel 

Shaken and sunder'd. 
Then they rode back, but not. 

Not the six hundred. 

4 
Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thunder'd; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
They that had struck so well 
Rode thro' the jaws of Death, 
Half a league back again. 
Up from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them. 

Left of six hundred. 

Honour the brave and bold! 

Long shall the tale be told. 

Yea, when our babes are old 

How they rode onward. 

This version met with great disfavour because of its omission of 
" the Light Brigade " and " Some one had blunder'd," which, as Ruskin 
said, was " precisely the most tragical line in the poem " ; and when 
Tennyson, in August 1855, heard that the soldiers before Sebastopol 
were enthusiastic over the original ballad, he restored it, with a few 
changes, had a thousand copies printed on a separate quarto sheet, and 
sent them out to the Crimea with his compliments. This, the final 
form, was reprinted in the second edition of Maud (1856). Tennyson 
said, " It is not a poem on which I pique myself." {Mem., I, 385- 
388; 409, 411.) 

The metre is irregular. The general movement is trochaic and dac- 
tylic with three stresses to the longer lines and two stresses to the 
wheels or short lines. The rhyme "hundred" — "onward" — "thun- 
der'd," etc., is a serious defect. The metrical prototype in English is 
Drayton's " Ballad of Agincourt." Tennyson, however, said that he 



THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE 375 

did not take the cadence from that poem, but derived it by repeat- 
ing to himself " Some one had blundered," a phrase in The Twies. 
(Rawnsley, p. 139.) After a most careful search this famous expres- 
sion has not come to light ; the nearest parallel to be found was " some 
hideous blunder " in the passage quoted above. • 



THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT 
BALACLAVA (Page 84) 

Published in Macmillan'' s Magazine, March 1882, and included in 
the Tiresias volume of 1885, with a "Prologue, to General Hamley," 
and an "Epilogue," justifying the praise of martial deeds. The poem 
celebrates an exploit even more remarkable, though less famous, than 
the charge of the Light Brigade. Tennyson drew his material from 
A. W. Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea (vol. II, pp. 393-478), with 
probable reference also to the account in The London Times of Nov. 
14, 1854. With great skill he has compressed Kinglake's minute nar- 
rative, and yet followed faithfully the military manoeuvres, even to 
particular phrases of description : e.g., " The sky-line was broken by 
squadrons of horse " (cf. 1. 5, original version) ; " There was many an 
English spectator who . . . long remembered the pang that he felt 
when he lost sight of Scarlett's ' three hundred.' To such a one the 
dark-mantled squadrons. overcasting his sight of the redcoats were as 
seas where a ship had gone down " (11. 36-43) ; " While his right arm 
was busy with the labour of sword against swords, he could so use his 
bridle-hand as to be fastening its grip upon the long-coated men of a 
milder race, and tearing them out of their saddles " (11. 52-55). The 
following note was appended to the poem : — 

The ' three hundred ' of the ' Heavy Brigade ' who made this famous charge 
were the Scots Greys and the 2nd squadron of Inniskillings, the remainder 
of the ' Heavy Brigade ' subsequently dashing up to their support. 

The 'three' were Scarlett's aide-de-camp, Elliot, and the trumpeter and 
Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him. 

The verse is an irregular triple cadence, handled w^ith great freedom 
and ranging from the full sweep of the anapsestic to the incisiveness 
of the dactylic. The transition from one to the other is marked in 
1. 35. Tennyson himself preferred the rhythmical effect to that of 
"The Charge of the Light Brigade." His reading brought out the 



376 NOTES 

heavy trampling of the horses "up the hill" (11. ii, 24, 63), and the 
shock of the assault (26-34). In strophes i and iv one rhyme is 
repeated at intervals throughout, and so binds into closer unity. 
Strophe iii opens with three bursting unrhymed Unes, followed by four 
all rhyming together. L. 8 has an internal rhyme. There is but one 
approximate rhyme : 46-48. 

84 5. Arose in replaced in 1885 broke in on (1882). 

85 14, 15. In 1882: — 

Down the hill, slowly, thousands of Russians 

Drew to the valley, and halted at last on the height, 

With a wing, etc. 

How this could be was rather puzzhng without a full knowledge of the 
manoeuvres. 

85 16. In 1882 : But Scarlett was far on ahead, and he dash'd up 
alone. 

85 18. In 1882 : Ajid he wheeVd his sabre, he held his own. 

85 20, 21. In 1882, one hne : And the three that were nearest him 
follow'' d with force. 

86 44. Whispering replaced in 1885 7nuttering. 

86 45. Of Scarlett's Brigade replaced in 1885 the Heavy Brigade. 
Cf. The Times : " ' God help them ! they are lost ! ' was the exclamation 
of more than one man." 

86 46, 47. Not in the 18S2 edition. 

86 49. Forest of lances : The phrase is in The Times. 

86 60. Not in the 1882 edition. 

86 62. Foeman replaced in 1885 Russian. 

86 64. And was not in the 1882 edition. 

86 66. And all the Brigade replaced in 1885 the Heavy Brigade, 
probably to make clear that not only ' the three hundred ' are meant, 
but also the men who succoured them. 



THE REVENGE (Page 87) 

Written, probably, in 1873. The first line had been in Tennyson's 
desk for years, but he finally finished the poem in a day or two. {Me?n., 
II, 142.) Published in The Nineteenth Century, March 1878, with the 
present title, and in Ballads, 1880. The material was collected for the 
poet by Sir Clements Markham, Secretary of the Hakluyt Society. The 



THE REVENGE 377 

original sources may be found in Arber's Reprints, 1871, viz., Sir Walter 
Raleigh's A Report of the Truth of the fight about the Isles of Azores, etc. 
(1591), Gervase Markham's poem, The Most Honorable Tragedie of Sir 
Richard Grinuile, R'night (ic^g^), and Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Dis- 
cours of Voyages (i 596-1 598). Tennyson used also Froude's account. 
(" England's Forgotten Worthies," in Short Studies, I.) Besides these, 
the story has been stirringly told, in verse by W. J. Linton (" Great Odds 
at Sea," 1859) and Gerald Massey (" Sir Richard Grenville's Last Fight," 
i860?), and in prose by Bacon [Considerations Touching a War with 
Spain, 1624) and R. L. Stevenson {The English Admirals). Tennyson, 
as usual, has worked many of the graphic details of his sources into 
swift and spirited music. He has added the dramatic dialogue. See 
The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 325. Carlyle said when he heard the poem, 
" Eh ! Alfred, you have got the grip of it," and Stevenson calls it " one 
of the noblest ballads in the English language." It should be compared 
and contrasted with Browning's " Herve Riel " and Campbell's " Battle 
of the Baltic." 

Sir Richard Grenville was one of the sea-dogs who made the west 
counties famous in the naval annals of England during the sixteenth 
century. He was a stern man, but high-minded and full of undaunted 
courage. An ideaUzed picture of his life is given in Kingsley's West- 
ward Ho! In 1585 he led out to Virginia the first English colony. 
In 1588 he had charge of the defence of Devon and Cornwall against 
the Spanish. 

Three years later he was put in command of the Revenge, one of the 
crack ships of its class, of 500 tons burden and a crew of 250 men. The 
Revenge was notoriously unlucky, but had carried the flag of Drake in 
the Channel fights against the Armada. Under Lord Thomas Howard, 
Grenville was sent to the Azores to intercept the annual treasure fleet 
returning to Spain from the West Indies. The Spanish king despatched 
in turn against the English a powerful fleet of fifty-three war-ships, 
crowded with soldiers. The Earl of Cumberland, who was coasting 
Portugal, sent a warning to Howard as he lay at anchor on the north 
side of Flores. But the pinnace which carried the message had hardly 
arrived when the fleet was at hand. The Lord Admiral with five of 
the six queen's ships got away. Grenville, delaying to bring his sick 
on board, was cut off from the rest of the squadron. Instead of 
attempting to escape by doubling on the enemy, he tried to pass 
through the whole Spanish fleet. Then followed the great fight, the 
naval Thermopylae of England, " memorable even beyond credit, and 



3/8 NOTES 

to the height of some heroical fable," as Bacon says, which is here 
glorified in imperishable verse. 

The free movement of the metre follows every turn of narration and 
description. The normal line is the six-stress (Tennyson's favourite 
ballad-measure), frequently halved by a pause and a middle rhyme 
(e.g., 1. 20). The last strophe is composed almost altogether in an ana- 
paestic cadence of five stresses, a metre slow and deliberate. It has 
been admirably analyzed by Mr. Sidney Colvin. {Macmillan'' s Magazine, 
January 1881.) 

87 1. Floras: the most westerly of the Azores. Both words sound 
the e, as in Spanish. Bideford (1. 17) is a trisyllable, and Seville (1. 30) 
is accented on the first syllable. 

88 26. Tell us now replaced in 18S0 let us know (1878), for the 
rhyme's sake. 

88 31. Froude : "To the English he was a goodly and gallant 
gentleman, who had never turned his back upon an enemy." 

88 39 ff. Raleigh (the main source ; he was Grenville's cousin) : — 
" The great San Philip being in the winde of him, and comming towards 
him, becalmed his sailes ... so huge and high carged was the Spanish 
ship, being of a thousand and fine hundreth tuns. . . . The said Philip 
carried three tire of ordinance on a side . . . After the Reiienge was 
intangled with this Philip, foure other boorded her; two on her lar- 
boord, and two on her starboord. . . . But the great San Philip hauing 
receyued the lower tire of the Reuenge, . . . shifted hir selfe with 
all diligence from her sides, vtterly misliking hir first entertainment." 
The phrase " the wombe of PhilUp " is in Markham, who also speaks of 
the ship's "mountain hugenes." 

89 57. According to Bacon, only fifteen ships were actually engaged 
with the Revenge. 

89 58. Froude : " Ship after ship of the Spaniards came on upon 
the Revenge, . . . washing up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled 
and shattered back amidst the roar of the artillery." 

89 61. Some were sunk: Two were sunk by the side of the 
Revenge; one withdrew to the harbour of St. Michael's and went 
dow^n there ; a fourth was beached to save her men. 

89 62. God of battles: Cf. Psalm xxiv, 8; and Harold, v. i, 325. 

90 65. Short summer night : The battle began at three in the after- 
noon on August 31, O.S. (or September 10, N.S.), 1591, and lasted for 
fifteen hours. Raleigh : " He was neuer so wounded as that hee for- 
sooke the vpper decke, til an houre before midnight ; and then being 



THE REVENGE 379 

shot into the bodie with a Musket as hee was dressing, was againe shot 
into the head, and withall his Chirurgion wounded to death." 

90 71-73. Froude : " The ship . . . was settUng slowly in the sea ; 
the vast fleet of the Spaniards lying round her, like dogs around a dying 
lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony." 

90 76 ff. Raleigh : " All the powder of the Reuenge to che last bar- 
rell was now spent, all her pikes broken, fortie of her best men slaine, 
and the most part of the rest hurt . . . the mastes all beaten ouer board, 
all her tackle cut a sunder." 

90 82 ff. Raleigh : " [Sir Richard] commanded the maister Gunner 
... to split and sinke the shippe. . . . And perswaded the companie, or 
as many as he could induce, to yeelde themselues vnto God, and to the 
mercie of none els ; but as they had like valiant resolute men, repulsed 
so manie enimies, they should not now shorten the honour of their 
nation, by prolonging their owne Hues for a few houres, or a few 
dales." 

91 101 ff. Linschoten : " Here die I Richard Greenfield, with a ioy- 
full and quiet mind, for that I haue ended my life as a true soldier 
ought to do, yat hath fought for his countrey, Queene, religion, and 
honor, whereby my soule most ioyfull departeth out of this bodie, and 
shall alwaies leaue behinde it an euerlasting fame of a valiant and true 
soldier, that hath done his duti^, as he was bounde to doe." 

91 108. Devil: The Spaniards, says Linschoten, told stories of his 
crushing wine glasses in his teeth and swallowing them, and w^hen the 
great storm fell upon them, " they verily thought that as he had a 
deuilish faith and religion, and therefore ye deuils loued him, so hee 
presently sunke into the bottome of the sea, and downe into Hell, where 
he raysed vp all the deuilles to the reuenge of his death." 

92 112. From the lands they had ruin'd: Raleigh says that the 
storm arose from the west and north-west ; so the " lands " are in the 
New World. Nature wreaks poetic justice. 

92 114. That evening: Tennyson has shortened the time for the 
sake of dramatic unity. Raleigh says that Sir Richard died " the second 
or third day," and that the storm arose " a fewe dales after the fight 
was ended." 

92 116. Out of one hundred and forty sail, only thirty-two ever 
reached a Spanish harbour. The Revenge went down under the rocks 
of St. Michael's, the most easterly of the islands. 



38o NOTES 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER (Page 92) 

Begun, and perhaps finished, m 1833 {Mem., I, 130) ; pubUshed in 
1842. English idyls, more or less akin to Tennyson's, had been written 
by Southey and Wordsworth, but the influences upon " The Gardener's 
Daughter" are the poetry of Theocritus (Idyl vii ; Stedman, p. 29), 
Goethe's "Amor als Landschaftsmaler," and the painting of Titian. 
The story is slight and unreal, but the story is not the main thing, as 
the sub-title indicates. Tennyson said : " The centre of the poem, that 
passage describing the girl [11. 124-139], must be full and rich. The 
poem is so, to a fault, especially the descriptions of nature, for the lover 
is an artist, but, this being so, the central picture must hold its place." 
A prologue called " The Ante-Chamber," describing a portrait of Eustace, 
was never printed with the poem because it was already overornamented. 
{Mem., I, 197-200.) 

The blank verse is in Tennyson's earlier manner, fluent and liquid, 
without the vigour and dignity of the Idylls of the King. There are 
78 run-on lines (or 28+%; about the same as in King Lear), and 5 
quasi feminine endings. L. 251 has a feminine syllable before the 
caesura. For details about pauses and substitutions, see Mayor, 
p. 208. 

93 12, 13. All grace Summ'd up and closed in little : Cf. Paradise 
Lost, viii, 473, and The Princess, ii, 20, 21. 

93 28. More black than ashbuds, etc.: One of Tennyson's most 
celebrated descriptive touches. See Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, ch. iv. 
Cf. "The Swallow's Message," 14, 15. The ash is preeminently the 
Lincolnshire tree. 

93 37 ff. The locahty is the vale of the Witham, and the "minster" 
is Lincoln Cathedral, 

94 46. The large lime feathers low: The lime gives out many 
branches close to the ground, with a light fringe of leafage. Cf. IVie 
Princess, iv, 5, and " Enoch Arden," 67, 68, 

94 47. Cf. Keats, " Ode to a Nightingale," v : — " The murmurous 
haunt of flies on summer eves." 

95 73 ff. See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 68. 

95 77. Smelt of the coming summer : Cf. Theocritus, vii, 143, Trdj/r' 
wcrSei' dipeos fxd\a iriovos. 

95 84. The steer forgot to graze : Cf. Virgil, Ed., viii, 2, " Imme- 
mor herbarum . . . iuvenca," and Horace, Odes, i, 15, 29-30. 



THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER 381 

95 87 ff. Cf. Theocritus, vii, 138-141, and Spenser, " Epithalamion," 
80-84. 

95 93. Tennyson told Rawnsley (p. 10 1) that this was the line on 
which he prided himself most. " I believe," he said, " that I was the 
first to describe the ouzel's note as a flute note." 

95 94. Redcap : provincial for " goldfinch." (yJ/<?w., I, 451.) 

96 no. Gave: opened (French ^f;/«d'r). Cf. 77/^ /'r/wc^jj-, Prologue, 
93, and i, 226. 

96 116. Garden-glasses : bell glasses used for covering the plants. 

96 132, 133. An allusion to the myth that traces of the fairies' feet 
remain visible in " greener circles " on the grass, long after their dances. 
See The Tempest, v, i, y], and Brand's Popular'^ntiquities (Bohn's 
edition, 1849), ii, 480. These circles are made by the growth of certain 
fungi {Alarasmius 07'eades). 

96 136. Hebe : goddess of eternal youth, cup-bearer of Olympus. 

98 167. The Titianic Flora : This picture is in the Uffizi Gallery 
at Florence. It is painted with a dazzling brightness, and represents a 
maiden giving a handful of roses, jessamines, and violets to a lover, 
who is not seen. 

98 181. Collins compares Theocritus, xv, 103 ff. 

98 188, 189. A Dutch love For tulips : The cultivation of tulips 
became a " tulipomania " in Holland towards the end of the seven- 
teenth century (see Dumas's La Tiilipe Noire), and continues to be 
most popular there. 

99 202-208. The Memoir (I, 198) says that these lines were 
originally : — 

Her beauty grew: till drawn in narrowing arcs 
The southing Autumn touch'd with sallower gleams 
The granges on the fallows. At that time, 
. Tired of the noisy town I wander'd there ; 
The bell toll'd four; and by the time I reach'd 
The Wicket-gate, I found her by herself. 

Fitzgerald pointed out that the autumn landscape was taken from 
Titian's " Three Ages," now in possession of Lord Ellesmere, and the 
lines were probably revised in consequence. 

99 204. The covenant of a God, etc. : Cf. Isaiah, Iv, 3. 

100 230. Faltering: From 1842 to 1850 lisping. 

100 248, 249. One night in the spring of 1831 Tennyson "saw the 
moonlight reflected in a nightingale's eye, as she was singing in the 



382 NOTES 

hedgerow " ; her voice vibrated with such passion that he WTote of 
"The leaves," etc. {Mem., I, 79.) 

101 263. The baby, Sleep : Cf . Shelley, Queen Mab, i, 40 : — 

"On their lids . . . 
The baby Sleep is pillowed." 



DORA (Page ioi) 

Fitzgerald saw "Dora" in 1835 {Mem., I, 151); first published in 
1842, with this not£, " The Idyl of ' Dora' was partly suggested by one 
of Miss Mitford's pastorals." The pastoral referred to is " Dora Cres- 
well" in Our Village. Tennyson changed the names, developed the 
character of Dora, who is a mere child in the original story, and worked 
out a new conclusion, for with Miss Mitford the farmer falls at once 
into his niece's gentle snare. The poet comments, " ' Dora,' being the 
tale of a nobly simple country girl, had to be told in the simplest pos- 
sible poetical language, and therefore was one of the poems which gave 
most trouble." {Mem., I, 196.) It is quite " un-Tennysonian," belong- 
ing to that pure order of art which marks the Book of Ruth and many of 
Wordsworth's poems (e.g., " Michael," and the episode of " Margaret," 
in The Excursion, Bk. I). Wordsworth said, " Mr. Tennyson, I have 
been endeavouring all my life to write a pastoral like your ' Dora ' 
and have not succeeded." 

The blank verse is singularly plain and perfect, in the Dorian mode. 
The proportion of end-stopt lines to run-on is about 3 to i. In Words- 
worth's " Tintern Abbey " they are about equal. There is but one 
feminine ending. The majority of the words are monosyllables. See 
The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 326. There is a remarkable effect in the 
repetition of 11. 76, 77 in 106, 107. There is not a simile, nor a word 
used in an unfamiliar sense, in the poem. 

102 26-31. The reading in 1842 was: — 

Look to 't, 
Consider: take a month to think, and give 
An answer to my wish; or by the Lord 
That made me, you shall pack, and nevermore 
Darken my doors again." And William heard. 
And answer'd something madly ; bit his lips, etc. 



CENONE 383 



CENONE (Page 107) 

The descriptions of scenery belong to the Pyrenees, not Mt. Ida, 
and were partly written in the Valley of Cauteretz, 1830. {Mem., I, 55.) 
Published in 1833, and much altered since. The story, taken from 
various sources (Ovid, Heroides, v ; Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, 1290- 
1309, Andromache, 274-308; Lucian, Dial. Mar., v. Dial. Dear., xx; 
Apuleius, Met., x, 30-32, etc.), needs no explanation. The poem may 
owe a little at the beginning to Beattie's " Judgment of Paris," with 
which Tennyson was doubtless familiar through his mother. (See 
Rawnsley, p. 225.) The speech of Pallas, in sentiment a deliberate 
anachronism, is a noble statement of his own philosophy of life. 

The blank verse is noteworthy for the use of a burthen to increase 
the musical effect, a device caught from the Sicilian idyllists. (Cf. 
Theocritus, i, ii; Moschus, iii. See Stedman, p. 213.) Observe that 
it occurs in three forms (22-23, S^* ^.nd 203), and the first form falls 
almost naturally into a lyrical arrangement : — 

O mother Ida, 
Many-fountain'd Ida, 
Dear mother Ida, 

Harken ere I die. 

There are more run-on lines and feminine endings than usual, though 
some have been removed by revision (82 run-on lines, 16 feminine end- 
ings in 264 lines, now; 94 run-on hues, 19 feminine endings in 256 
lines, in 1833). The present form shows also a smoother verse, and a 
freer diversifying of the pause. L. 177 has an awkward transposition 
of the stress in the last bar. See Mayor's tables, p. 208. 
107 1-21. In 1833 ths reading was : — 

There is a dale in Ida, lovelier 
Than any in old Ionia, beautiful 
With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean 
Above the loud glenriver, which hath worn 
A path thro' steepdown granite walls below 
Mantled with flowering tendriltwine. In front 
The cedarshadowy valleys open wide. 
Far-seen, high over all the Godbuilt wall 
And many a snowycolumned range divine, 
Mounted with awful sculptures — men and Gods, 
The work of Gods — bright on the darkblue sky 
The windy citadel of lUon 



384 NOTES 

Shone, like the crown of Troas. Hither came 

Mournful CEnone wandering forlorn 

Of Paris, once her playmate. Round her neck, 

Her neck all marblewhite and marblecold, 

Floated her hair or seemed to float in rest. 

She, leaning on a vine-entwined stone, 

Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shadow 

Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff. 

The revision of CEnone began almost immediately after its publication. 
{Mem., I, 145; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 21.) The verse in this opening 
passage is now stronger, the landscape painted with more imagination, 
simplicity, and directness. For a careful study of the text see Stopford 
Brooke, pp. 113 ff- 

107 10. Gargarus : the highest peak of Mt. Ida, It is impossible 
to tell whether Tennyson has authority for this form of the name. In 
Homer, it is always in the dative or accusative singular without the 
article, so that one cannot determine the nominative. In Lucian, 
Dial. Deor., xx, 5, the singular is neuter ; so elsewhere. A town on the 
mountain, named 17 Tdpyapos, is mentioned by Quintus Smyrnaeus, x, 90. 

107 16. Paris : the son of Priam, king of Troas, brought up among 
the shepherds of Mt. Ida, and there wedded to GEnone. " Once 
her playmate" may have been suggested by Ovid, Heroides, v, 157, 
" Tecumque fui puerilibus annis." 

107 19. A fragment, i.e., of stone, as the 1833 version shows. Cf. 
"Lancelot and Elaine," 1416, "Among the tumbled fragments of the 
hills." 

107 22. Many-fountain' d Ida : the regular Homeric epithet. (//., 
xiv, 157, etc). 

107 24. Added in 1842. It is a translation of Callimachus {Lava- 
crum Palladis, 72). 

107 26. Cf. Theocritus, vii, 22, 'AviKa 8r] Kal aaOpos iv al/JLaa-taTai 
KaOevdet. 

108 27. In 1833, th>^ee lines: — 

Sleeps like a shadow, and the scarletwinged 

Cicala in the noonday leapeth not 

Along the water-rounded granite-rock, etc.; 

with this footnote : " In the Pyrenees, where part of this poem was 
written, I saw a very beautiful species of Cicala, which had scarlet 
wings spotted with black. Probably nothing of the kind exists in 



(ENONE 385 

Mount Ida." From 1842 to (but not including) 1S84 the line read 
" Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps." This was false to 
Nature, for the cicala does not sleep at noonday. 

108 29. Cf. Theocritus, ii, 38-41. 

108 30. Cf. 2 Hairy VI, ii, 3, 17, "Mine eyes are full of tears, my 
heart of grief." 

108 37. River-God : Cebren, a small river of the Troad. (Apollo- 
dorus, iii, 12, 6.) 

108 40. Cf. note on " Tithonus," 62. 

108 46. Not in 1833 edition. 

108 49. Cf. Iliad, iii, 39 Aijo-irapi, eJdos ApLare. 

108 5]. Simois : a small tributary of the Scamander, rising in 
Mt. Ida. Reedy : Homeric epithet for a river. Cf. //., iv, 383. 

108, 109 53-58. In 1833: — 

I sate alone : the goldensandalled morn 

Rosehued the scornful hills : I sate alone 

With downdropt eyes : whitebreasted like a star 

Fronting the dawn he came: a leopard skin 

From his white shoulder drooped : his sunny hair, etc. 

109 57. A leopard skin : As in I/iad, iii, 17. 

109 60. The iridescence on the foam sparkles as the wind stirs it. 

109 61, 62. In 1833: — 

and I called out, 
" Welcome, Apollo, welcome home Apollo, 
Apollo, my Apollo,, loved Apollo." 

Surely this was a lame and impotent conclusion ; but cf. Keats, Hyperion, 
ii, 293-295. 

109 64-67. In 1833: — 

He, mildly smiling, in his milkwhite palm 

Close-held a golden apple, lightningbright 

With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of Heaven 

Ambrosially smelling. From his hp. 

Curved crimson, the fullflowing, etc. 

109 65. Hesperian : The Hesperides were the daughters of Atlas, 
and guarded a tree of golden apples in the far-famed gardens of the 
west. 

109 67. River of speech: Cf. Cicero, Acad., ii, 38, 119, " flumen 
orationis." 

109 69. My in 1842 replaced mine. 



386 NOTES 

109, 110 71-87. Would seem, etc. In 1833: — 

in aftertime may breed 
Deep evilwilledness of heaven and sere 
Heartburning toward hallowed Ilion ; 
And all the colour of my afterlife 
Will be the shadow of today. Today 
Here and Pallas and the floating grace 
Of laughterloving Aphrodite meet 
In manyfolded Ida to receive 
This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand 
Award the palm. Within the green hillside, 
Under yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, 
Is an ingoing grotto, strown with spar 
And ivymatted at the mouth, wherein 
Thou unbeholden may'st behold, unheard, etc. 

The revision takes from Paris a knowledge of the ruin to be wrought 
to Ilium (which was out of character), and from the natural description 
its distracting minuteness. 

109 74. Married brows : eyebrows that meet, still considered a 
beauty in the East ; Greek a^vocppvs. (Theocritus, viii, 72 ; Anacreont., 
XV, 16; Ovid, Ars Amat., iii, 201.) 

109 79. Peleus : a mythical king of Thessaly, father of Achilles. 
At his marriage with the sea-nymph Thetis the gods were present with 
their gifts. 

109 81. Light-foot Iris : Homer's epithet. Iris was the messenger 
of the gods, the mistress of the rainbow. 

109 82, 83. By common voice Elected umpire : Cf. Lucian, Dial. 
Deor., XX, 1,2. 

110 91-97. Sides, etc. In 1833: — 

hills. 
They came — all three — the Olympian goddesses: 
Naked they came to the smoothswarded bower. 
Lustrous with lilyflower, violeteyed 
Both white and blue, with lotetree-fruit thickset, 
Shadowed with singing pine; and all the while. 
Above, the overwandering ivy, etc. 

One of these lines was perhaps the most violent cacophony that 
Tennyson ever committed. 

110 94 ff. Imitated from Homer, //., xiv, 347-349. Cf. also Hesiod, 
Theog., 195, and " Demeter and Persephone," 48-51. 

110 95. Amaracus : an aromatic plant, the dittany of Crete. 



' (ENONE 387 

110 100. Following this in 1833 came: — 

On the treetops a golden glorious cloud 
Leaned, slowly dropping down ambrosial dew. 
How beautiful they were, too beautiful 
To look upon ! but Paris was to me 
More lovelier than all the world beside. 

O mother Ida, hearken ere I die. 

First spake the imperial Olympian 

With arched eyebrow smiling sovranly, ' 

FuUeyed Here. She to Paris made, etc. 

110 102. Peacock : sacred to Here, perhaps as symbolical of the 
starry heavens. 

110 103, 104. From Iliad, xiv, 350, 351. 

110 107, 108. The Gods Rise up : As in Iliad, xv, 84-86. 

110 113. In 1833: Or upland glebe wealthy in oil and wmc. 

110 114. "Honour," she said, "and homage" replaced in 1842 
Honour afid ho7nage, tribute, etc. 

110 116. Beneath in 1842 replaced below, because of " sha^/c^ze/ing " 
in the same line. 

111 123-125. In 1833: — 

Alliance and allegiance evermore. 

Such boon from me Heaven's Queen to thee kingborn, etc. 

Ill 127. Power in 1842 replaced this, a weak ending. 
Ill 129. Quiet seats: Lucretius's "sedes quietae " (iii, 18). See 
note on "The Lotos-Eaters," 156. 
Ill 131. After this, in 1833 : — 

The changeless calm of undisputed right, 

The highest height and topmost strength of power. 

Ill 135. Spirit in 1842 replaced heart, which rhymed with " apart " 
in the next line. 

Ill 137. O'erthwarted : The spear leaned across her body and over 
one shoulder. 

Ill 143. This line in 1842 replaced three: — 

Are the three hinges of the gates of Life, 

That open into power, everyway 

Without horizon, bound or shadow or cloud. 

The first of these was excellent, but it had to be cut out for the sake 
of compression. 



388 NOTES 

111 145. Would replaced in 1842 Will. 

111 147. Cf. Cicero, De Fin., 2, 45. 

112 150-164. In 1833: — 

Not as men value gold because it tricks 

And blazons outward Life with ornament, 

But rather as the miser, for itself. 

Good for selfgood doth half destroy selfgood. 

The means and end, like two coiled snakes, infect 

Each other, bound in one with hateful love. 

So both into the fountain and the stream 

A drop of poison falls. Come hearken to me. 

And look upon me and consider me, 

So shalt thou find me fairest, so endurance. 

Like to an athlete's arm, shall still become 

Sinewed with motion, till thine active will 

(As the dark body of the Sun robed round 

With his own ever-emanating lights) 

Be flooded o'er with her own effluences. 

And thereby grow to freedom.' 

" Here she ceased, etc. 

112 151. Sequel of guerdon : i.e., a reward to follow your choice 
of me. 

112 160. A life of shocks: Cf. In Mem., cxviii, 24, 25. It is such 
a life that Robert Browning praises, but Browning does not conceive of 
it as acting under the control of law. See Dowden, " Mr. Tennyson 
and Mr. Browning," in Studies in Literature. 

112 162. And the full-grown will, etc. : That is, the will, perfectly 
disciphned, will become its own law, which is the highest kind of 
freedom. Cf. second collect. Morning Prayer, in the Episcopal Book of 
Co7ni)ion Prayer, " O God . , . whose service is perfect freedom." 

112 165. And I cried replaced in 1842 I cried out. 

112 167. Hearing would not hear: Cf. Aeschylus, Prometheus 
Bound, 448, kKvovtcs ovk tJkovov. 

112 170. Idalian: so called from IdaUum, a town in Cyprus, sacred 
to her. Beautiful replaced in 1842 oceanborn, a regrettable change 
from the specific to the general. The picture should be compared with 
that of the newly-risen Aphrodite in The Princess, vii, 148-154. 

112 171. Paphian: At the city of Paphos in Cyprus Aphrodite set 
foot on land after her birth amid the waves, and it became the centre 
of her worship. Tennyson seems to be drawing on the Homeric Hymn 
to Aphrodite, 59 ff. 



CENONE 389 

112 172. Backward in 1842 replaced upward. Cf. " Mariana in the 
South" (1833 version, st. 2): — 

She . . . 

From her warm brow and bosom down 
Through rosy taper fingers drew 

Her streaming curls of deepest brown. 

112 173. Deep in 1842 replaced dark. The colour of Aphrodite's 
hair was changed to conform to tradition. 

112 174-176. In 1833: — 

Fragrant and thick, and on her head upbound 
In a purple band : below her lucid neck 
Shone ivorylike, and from the ground her foot 
Gleamed rosywhite, etc. 

113 183. Wife: Helen, the "Greek woman" of 1. 257. See note, 
" Dream of Fair Women," 85. 

113 184-186. In 1833, two lines: — 

I only saw my Paris raise his arm : 
I only saw great Here's angry eyes. 

113 195. Pards : Mentioned as inhabiting Ida in the Homeric 
Hymn to Aphrodite., 71. 

113 203. In 1833: Dear mother Ida., hearken ere I die. So also 
in 252. 

113 205. Tall dark reversed the order of the w^ords in 1833. 

113 206. In 1833: — 

— gorge, or lower down 
Filling greengulphed Ida, all between, etc. 

114 216-225. Added in 1842. 

114 220. The Abominable : Eris, goddess of Discord, who took this 
revenge for not being invited, with the other deities, to the wedding. 
Hesiod calls her a-rvyep-n {Theog., 226). 

114 226. In 1833 : Oh ! mother Ida, hearken ere I die. 

115 241. In 1833 : Yet, another Ida, hear me ere I die. 

115 242. Fiery thoughts : Parthenius {Erot., iv) says that CEnone 
was gifted with prophecy and the art of healing. She warned Paris 
that he would be wounded and that' she alone could cure him. When 
he came to her, she avenged her desertion by refusing his cry for help. 
Later, repenting, she rushed to his aid, but finding him dead, threw her- 
self upon his funeral pyre. This is doubtless the course of events which 



390 NOTES 

CEnone here dimly foresees. Tennyson has told the conclusion of the 
legend in "TheDeath of CEnone," 1892 (based upon Quintus Smyr- 
naeus, x). Cf. William Morris, " The Death of Paris," in The Earthly 
Paradise. 

115 249-251. In 1833, one line: Ere it is born. I will not die 
alone. 

115 250. Child : According to the later form of the story, Oinone 
had a child by Paris named Corythus, killed by his father, who was jeal- 
ous of Helen's tenderness toward him. See Parthenius, Erot., xxxiv, 
and W. S. Landor's " Corythos." 

115 259. Cassandra: Priam's daughter, to whom Apollo gave the 
gift of prophecy, with the condition that no one should believe her. 
A fire: Cf. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1256 ff., and Schiller's ballad, 
" Kassandra," st. 5, " Eine Fackel seh' ich gliihen," etc. 

115 264. Cf. Webster, Duchess of Malfi, iv, 2, 32: — 

" The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass, 
The earth of flaming sulphur." 



ULYSSES (Page 116) 

Tennyson said, " ' Ulysses ' was written soon after Arthur Hallam's 
death [Sept. 15, 1833], and gave my feelings about the need of going 
forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than any- 
thing in In Memoriujn.'" {Mem., I, 196.) Published in 1842, with the 
text as it now stands. It is a character-piece of the reflective order. 
(See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 327.) The reading of this poem and 
" Locksley Hall " is said to have determined Sir Robert Peel to give 
Tennyson a pension in 1845. (Wemyss Reid, Life of Lord Houghton, 
I, 297.) The inspiration came from Dante, Inf., xxvi, 90-120, where 
Ulysses addresses the Poets in the Eighth Bolgia : — " When I departed 
from Circe, . . . neither fondness for my son, nor piety for my old father, 
nor the due love that should have made Penelope glad, could overcome 
within me the ardour that I had to gain experience of the world, and of 
the vices of men, and of their valour. But I put forth on the deep, open 
sea, with one vessel only, and with that little company by which I had 
not been deserted. ... I and my companions were old and slow 
when we came to that narrow strait where Hercules set up his bounds, 
to the end that man may not put out beyond. ... ' O brothers,' said 
I, ' who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the West, to 



ULYSSES 391 

this so little vigil of your senses that remains be ye unwilling to deny 
the experience, following the sun, of the world that hath no people. 
Consider ye your origin ; ye were not made to live as brutes, but for 
pursuit of virtue and of knowledge." (Translation of C. E. Norton.) 
Dante was probably ignorant of the Homeric narrative, in which Odys- 
seus after leaving Circe descends into Hades, and ultimately returns to 
Ithaca (but see Lyall, p. 41), and his story, as far as we know, is his 
own invention. Tennyson departs from Dante in transferring the 
scene to Ithaca, and from Homer, among many things, in bringing 
the companions of Ulysses safely home from their wanderings after 
the siege of Troy. In short, Tennyson's conception is partly classical, 
partly mediaeval, partly modern and personal, and so it represents 
the spirit of men, of whatever time, who have been led on by an 
indomitable desire for knowledge. Contrast the mood of " The Lotos- 
Eaters." 

The blank verse is of rare excellence, stately and yet flexible (note 
the varied pauses in 13-17, 44-50, and the running-on of the verse in 3, 8, 
9, 10, 19, 24, 30, 39, 47, 55, 58, 65, 69). The style is forcible without 
excess, and condensed without obscurity (notice 4, 6, 11, 16-17, 24, 
30-33, 65-70). The metaphors are simple and large ("All experience 
is an arch," " Life piled on life," " the baths of all the western stars," 
etc.). The proportion of end-stopt to run-on lines is about 2 to i. In 
Shakespeare's later style it is about 3 to 2. In Paradise Lost, i, it is 
about 4 to 3. 

116 7. Life to the lees : Cf. Macbeth, ii, 3, 100. 

116 10. The rainy Hyades : Virgil's " pluvias Hyades " {Aen., i, 
744), a group of seven stars in the constellation Taurus, called " rainy " 
because their setting in April and November was for the ancients a 
sure presage of wet weather. 

116 13, 14. From Odyssey, i, 1-3. Cf. Horace, Ars Poet., 141, 142. 

116 16. Delight of battle: a translation of Attila's phrase at the 
battle of Chalons, " certaminis gaudia." (Jordanis, De Origine Getarum, 
xxxix.) 

116 17. Windy Troy: Homer's "IXtos •^j'e^i6eo-cra. (//., xii, 115, etc.) 

116 18. A part : Cf. Aeneid, ii, 6, " Quorum pars magna fui " ; also, 
" Aylmer's Field," 12, and Byron, Childe Harold, iii, st. 72 : — 

"I live not in myself, but I become 
Portion of that around me." 

116 20, 21. Cf. Aeneid, iii, 496. 



392 NOTES 

116 22. Ulysses says in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, iii, 

3.152: — 

" To have done is to hang 
Quite out of fashion, hke a rusty mail 
In monumental mockery." 

And see " Love thou thy land," 41, 42. 

116 24. Life piled on life : A sonnet assigned to 1 828-1 830, 
printed in the Memoir, I, 59, contains this metaphor, and manifests the 
aspiration of Ulysses thus early in Tennyson's life. 

117 31. Cf. " The Voyage," sts. viii, ix ; "Merlin and The Gleam." 
117 33. Telemachus : the only son of Ulysses and Penelope, the 

charge of Pallas and a type of youthful discretion. He is the hero of 
Fenelon's Telhnaque. 

117 45. Mr. Herbert Paul (77/^ Nineteenth Century, March 1893) 
points out that the Homeric mariner never set sail at twilight if he 
could help it. But Tennyson chose the evening because it harmonized 
with the closing venture of Ulysses's life. For classical analogues to 
the address which follows, see Odyssey, xii, 206-216; Aeneid, i, 198-207 ; 
Horace, Odes, i, 7, 25-32. 

117 58, 59. Cf. the recurring line of the Odyssey (iv, 580, etc.) : 
€^■^5 5' e^Ofieuoi Tro\tr]v d\a tvtttov eperfioTs. 

117 60, 61. The baths of all the western stars: Cf. Odyssey, v, 275 ; 
also, Arnold's " Sohrab and Rustum," ad fin., "From whose floor the 
new-bathed stars Emerge." 

117, 118 62-64. " These hnes do not make me weep, but there is 
in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read." (Carlyle to 
Tennyson, Mem., I, 214.) 

118 63. The Happy Isles: The Islands of the Blest gradually 
became identified with the Elysian Fields as the abode of just men 
after death. They were supposed to lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules 
(the strait of Gibraltar) ; and so the name " Fortunatae Insulae " was 
apphed to the Canary and Madeira Islands, when they were discovered. 
Cf. "Tiresias," 162 ff. 

118 64. Achilles, in Odyssey, xi, 467 ff., is seen by Odysseus in 
Hades ; but many later writers assign him to the " Happy Isles " (e.g., 
Pindar, 01., ii, 142; Plato, Symp., 179 E, 180 B, etc.). 

118 69. Strong in will : Tennyson's favourite doctrine of the 
unconquerable will. Cf. " Will," i ff. ; " Early Sonnets," iii, i. 



TITHONUS 393 



TITHONUS (Page ii8) 

Begun about 1835, and finished in 1859 in order that it might be 
published by Thackeray in the Cornhill Magazine, February i860; 
reprinted in Enoch Arden, etc., 1864. {Mem., I, 443, 459.) The poem 
is a dramatic monologue of Tithonus, the husband of Eos (Dawn), 
at whose request he has obtained from the gods immortality, but not 
eternal youth, so that he gradually withers away. His story is men- 
tioned in "The Grasshopper" (in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 1830). The 
main source of the myth and the poem is the Homeric Hymn to Aphro- 
dite, 218-239. The grief attributed by Tennyson to Dawn is not clas- 
sical. Cf. the fate of the struldbrugs in Gtilliver's Travels, pt. iii, ch. x. 
Mr. Stephen Phillips illustrates 11. 28-31 in his poem " Mai-pessa." 

The style is steady and strong, being intentionally restrained. There 
are but 18 run-on lines, and no feminine endings. 

118 1. The woods decay replaced in 1864 '^y ^^^' o-y w^.' which 
made a weak beginning and was better left to 1. 50. 

118 4. Swan: Aristotle {Hist. An., 9, 12, p. 615 a ^-^ calls swans 
6U777P01, i.e., enjoying a green old age. They have been known to live 
to the age of fifty. 

118 7. Cf. the Hymn to Aphrodite, 227 : — vote irap ^Q,Keavoio porjs eirl 
ireipaa-L yair]s. 

118 18. Hours : the goddesses who cause all things to come into 
being, ripen, and decay at the appointed time. They are made attend- 
ants of Eos by Quintus Smyrnaeus (i, 50 ; ii, 594, 658). Cf. Paradise 
Lost, vi, 3, and the celebrated picture by Guido Reni in the Rospigliosi 
Palace at Rome. 

119 29. Kindly : Rolfe interprets " natural " as in " the kindly fruits 
of the earth," in the Boo^ of Common Prayer. 

119 39. The replaced in 1864 /^a/. The team are the steeds Lampus 
and Phaethon, which drew Dawn's chariot up to Olympus to proclaim 
the coming of day. (See Odyssey, xxiii, 246.) 

119 42. Cf. Catullus, Ixiii, 41, " [Sol] Pepulitque noctis umbras 
vegetis sonipedibus." Collins compares Marston, Afitonio and Mellida, 
pt. II, i, I, 107, 108 : — 

" For see, the dapple grey coursers of the morn 
Beat up the light with their bright silver hooves." 

119 49. Collins compares the couplet of Agathon quoted by Aris- 
totle, Nic. Eth., vi, 2, "Of this alone is even God deprived — to make 



394 



NOTES 



undone whatsoever hath been done." But it is a general principle of 
classical mythology, as illustrated by the legend of Cassandra. 

120 62, 63. Apollo built the walls of Troy for King Laomedon, the 
father of Tithonus, to the music of his lyre, just as Amphion aided in 
the building of Thebes. (Ovid, Heroides, xvi, i8o.) Cf. Paradise Lost, i, 
7 10 ff. ; " CEnone," 39-41 ; " Tiresias," 96 ; " Gareth and Lynette," 254-258. 

120 71. Barrows : burial mounds. Cf. " Enoch Arden," 7 and 439. 

120 75. Earth in earth: Cf. Stephen Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure, 
xlv, " When earth in earth hath ta'en his corrupt taste." 

LUCRETIUS (Page 121) 

Written in 1865; printed in MacmillarCs Magazine, May 1868, in 
Every Saturday (New York), May 2, 1868, and in The Holy Grail, 
etc., 1869. Tennyson's story of the death of Lucretius is based upon 
two passages in St. Jerome, (i) Addition to the Eusebian Chronicle 
(under 94 B.C.): — "Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur, qui postea amatorio 
poculo in f urorem versus, cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae con- 
scripsisset, . , . propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliiii." (2) Epist. 
xxxvi, Ad Rufin., ch. 23 : — " Livia virum suum interfecit, quern nimis 
odiit : Lucillia suum, quem nimis amavit. Ilia sponte miscuit aconitum : 
haec decepta, f urorem propinavit pro amoris poculo." Later writers con- 
nected (2) with Lucretius on circumstantial evidence. Tennyson repre- 
sents the great Latin poet as uttering the doctrines of the De Rerum 
Natura for the most part with a clear mind, but occasionally haunted 
with visions of madness. Essays by Professor Jebb {Macmillan''s 
Magazine, June 1868) and Katharine Allen {Poet Lore, XI, 529) are 
helpful in studying the relation of Tennyson to Lucretius. 

John Addington Symonds calls this " perhaps the most splendid of 
all Tennyson's essays in blank verse, and the most gorgeously coloured 
piece of unrhymed English since Milton." The large number of poly- 
syllables, indeed, impart a Miltonic fulness of sound. (See, e.g., 11. 30, 
40, 156-159.) There are 7 feminine endings and 86 run-on lines. 

121 6. Pacings in the field : Cf. De Rer. Nat., iv, 459. 

121 7. To greet him with a kiss : Cf. De Rer. Nat., iii, 894 ff. 
121 12, 13. These three hundred scrolls Left by the Teacher: 
Diogenes Laertius, x, 17, attributes three hundred scrolls to Epicurus. 

121 29 ff. Cf. simile in De Rer. Nat., i, 280 ff. 

122 36-43. Tennyson here presents Lucretius's view of the incessant 
disintegration and recombination of the atomic elements of the world. 



LUCRETIUS 395 

(See De Rer. Nat., i, 988 ff, 1102-1110; ii, 1052-1066, etc.) The more 
modern idea of the atomic theory is given in The Princess, ii, 101-104. 

122 40. Ruining : Cf. Par. Lost, vi, 868, " Hell saw Heaven ruin- 
ing from Heaven." Inane : Cf. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, iii, at 
end, " Pinnacled dim in the intense inane." 

122 44. The dog, etc.: This is taken from De Rer. Nat., iv, 991-994, 
where the poet speaks of dogs and other animals repeating in dreams 
their waking actions. 

122 47. Sylla: dictator of Rome B.C. 81-79, who massacred thou- 
sands during and after his war with Marius, and who retired from pub- 
lic affairs to live a life of debauchery. The epithet "mulberry-faced" 
(1. 54) is from a skit preserved in Plutarch's Life of Sulla, ii, avKdfxivSv 
ead' 6 SyXXas dX^tVy Treiracriiivov. 

122 50. Dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth : See Ovid, Met., iii, 
I ff. The dragon was slain by Cadmus, and warriors sprang up where 
he sowed its teeth. 

122 52. Hetairai : courtesans. (Greek, eratpai.) 

123 70. Prooemion : the proem (i, 1-49) to the De Rer. Nat., which 
extols Venus. For Lucretius's appreciation of his own work, see i, 923 ; 
iv, I. 

123 79. Calm: This view of ideal tranquillity (which recurs in no, 
217, 265) is expressed in De Rer. N'at., ii, i ff. 

123 82. Mavors : Mars, the god of war. This form is used by 
Lucretius in i, 32. 

123 88. The Trojan: Anchises. <Zi.Yiovi\&ricHymntoAphrodite,(i^^. 

123 89, Hunter : Adonis, loved of Venus, killed by a wound from a 
boar. See Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. 

123 91. Apple-arbiter: Paris. See"OEnone." 

124 93. The great Sicilian: Empedocles (flourished c. 450 B.C.), 
the philosopher of Agrigentum, praised by Lucretius, i, 716-733. A 
fragment of his, in Hippolytus, Refutatio Haeresium, vii, 31, which 
probably began the last book of his poem, has : — afi^pore Movaa . . . 
pvv adre TrapiaTa<To, KaXXt67reto, k.t.X. 

124 94. Calliope : muse of epic poetry. 

124 95. Kypris : a name for Aphrodite from the island of Cyprus, 
which was the centre of her worship. (See note, "CEnone," 1. 171.) 

124 97-102. Tennyson has in mind De Rer. Nat., i, 6-20, 252-264. 

124 104-110. This is from Lucretius (iii, 18-22. Cf. ii, 645-651, 
V, 82 ff.), who borrowed it in turn from Odyssey, vi, 42-46. Cf. " The 
Lotos-Eaters," 155 ff; " GEnone," 128-131 ; " Morte d' Arthur," 260 ff. 



396 NOTES 

124 114. The obvious inconsistency between the existence of gods 
and a thorough-going mechanical theory of the universe, Lucretius, in 
his poem, does not face or seem to appreciate. 

124 ]16. My master held: The reference is to Epicurus's letter to 
Menoeceus (Diogenes Laertius, x, 27). Lucretius discusses the grounds 
of belief in v, 1161-1193. 

124 118. Translated from iii, 3, 4. Cf. v, 55, 56. 

124 119. Memmius: C. Memmius Gemellus, to whom De Rerum 
Nahira is dedicated. 

125 125. Delius : surname of Apollo, from Delos, the island where 
he was born. 

125 126. Hyperion : properly a Titan, father of the sun-god Helios ; 
here, however, as often in Homer, used for Hehos himself. (See, e.g., 
//., xix, 398.) Shakespeare, Spenser, Gray, and Keats throw the accent 
wrongly on the second syllable. The epithet " all-seeing" is from Od., 
xii, 323. In Od., xii, 382, 383, 394-396, Homer tells how the Sun, 
incensed at the slaughter of his sacred oxen, made the skins creep 
and the flesh bellow. 

125 137, 138. Cf. De Rer. Nat., ii, 576, 577, v, 223. 

125 142, 143. Cf. iii, 900-911. 

125 147. Plato where he says : The passage is in the Phaedo, 
61 A-62 C. Cicero quotes and inteiprets it as Tennyson does, in De 
Senectiite, 73. 

126 165. Idols : an allusion to the " simulacra," or films, which 
Lucretius says are constantly streaming from all surfaces, flying to and 
fro in the air, and deceiving us aw^ake and asleep, (iv, 30 ff.) 

126 177 ff. Probably suggested by De Rer. Nat, vi, 175 ff. 

126 182. Picus and Faunus : ancient gods of Latium. The allusion 
is to Ovid's tale {Fasti, iii, 289-328) of how King Numa captured them 
drowsy-drunk in the Aventine grove, in order to force them to reveal a 
way of averting Jove's thunder. 

127 188-191. In Macmillan''s Magazine these lines stand: — 

And here an Oread, and this way she runs 
Before the rest, etc. 

Every Saturday has the omitted passage in full. Perhaps Tennyson 
thought at first that it was too Swinburnian for the British public, 
though not for the Americans ; but more likely a prudish editor was 
to blame. 

127 193. Proved : In De Rer. Nat., ii, 700 ff., and v, 878 ff. 



ST. AGNES' EVE 397 

127 210-212. Cf. ii, 7-13. 

127 213. Suggested by ii, 29-33, ^^ v, 1392 ff. 

128 223-225. See i, 933-950; iv, 8-25. * 

128 235. Her: Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, who, when dishonoured 
by Sextus Tarquinius, stabbed herself, and so roused the people to expel 
the kings. (See Livy, i, 57-59.) Cf. Shakespeare's /^ape of Lucrece. 

128 241. The Commonwealth, which breaks : Lucretius died prob- 
ably in 55 B.C., when the First Triumvirate had absorbed all the power, 
and the Republic was moribund. 

128 243. The womb and tomb of all : Cf. De Rer. Nat., v, 258-260 ; 
ii, 999, and Milton, Far. Lost, ii, 911. 

128 245. Blind beginnings : Lucretius's " primordia caeca," i, 
1 1 10, etc. 

128 250. Cf. V, 95. 

129 256. From v, 311. 

129 257. Atom and void: See i, 1008 ff. 

129 259. A truth, etc. : Lucretius by many arguments seeks to 
prove the mortality of the soul and the non-existence of a world of the 
dead. See iii, 978 ff., and Munro's note on 1. ion. 

129 260. Ixionian wheel : Ixion was punished for casting a lustful 
eye on Juno, by being fastened to an ever-revolving fiery wheel in Hades. 

129 262. So Lucretius balances "mortal" and "immortal" in iii, 869. 

129 273. Thus — thus: The words mark the stabs, as in Dido's 
dying speech, " Sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras." {Aejzeid, iv, 660.) 

129 280. 1\\ the magazines this line was, What matters ? All is 
over : Fare thee well I Tennyson transformed a weak conclusion into 
one that is highly tragic and pregnant with character. 

ST. AGNES' EVE (Page 130) 

This mystical poem, which was written by 1834 {Mem., I, 142), 
appeared in The Keepsake, 1837, and was reprinted in 1842. Before 
1857 the title was "St. Agnes," but it is not possible that Tennyson 
ever meant the child-saint who suffered martyrdom under Diocletian 
to be the subject of his poem. Rather it is supposed to be spoken by 
a nun who embodies her spirit, on the eve of January 21, St. Agnes' 
Day. On that night, according to the ancient legend, a pure maiden, 
fasting, may hope to have a vision of her future husband. (Brand, Fop. 
Ant., I, 34-38.) Here it is the Heavenly Bridegroom that the maiden 
longs to see. Contrast the sentiment of this piece with " The Eve of 



398 NOTES 

St. Agnes " by Keats ; compare the nun with Percivale's sister in " The 
Holy Grail." 

Each stanza is composed of three quatrains of the common metre, 
with interwoven rhyme, unified by a single thought. The ordinary 
rapidity of the verse-form is reduced at first by making many of the 
unstressed syllables long in quantity. See Professor A. S. Cook's 
article on the poem in Poet Lore, III, lo. 

130 3, 4. Cf. Keats's " Eve of St. Agnes," st. i : — 

" His frosted breath, 
Like pious incense from a censer old, 
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death." 

130 12. In in 1S42 replaced on (1837). 
130 16. Argent round : the silver moon at the full. 
130 17. Cf. Rev., vii, 9. 

130 19, 20. Cf. 2 Co}\, V, I, and "The Deserted House," 12. 
130 23, 24. Cf. Rev., iii, 5 ; xix, 7, 8. In the legend of St. Agnes 
she is miraculously clothed with a white vesture. 

130 28. Strows in 1842 replaced strews (1837). 

131 31. Heavenly Bridegroom : Cf. Isaiah, Ixii, 5 ; Matt., xxv, 1-13. 
The latter. Professor Cook notes, is the Gospel for St. Agnes' Day. 
When the saint was urged to marry a Roman noble, she exclaimed, 
says the Golden Legend, " Go from me, and know that I am loved of 
another lover, which hath fianced me by his faith. I will have none 
other spouse but him." 

131 32. In 1837: To wash me pure from sin. 
131 35. Shining sea : Cf. Rev., xv, 2. 



SIR GALAHAD (Page 131) 

Written by 1834 {Mem., I, 139), and printed in 1842. The character 
in the poem is the counterpart in manhood of the nun in " St. Agnes' 
Eve." Galahad was the saintly hero who gradually took the place of 
Percivale in the later legends of the Holy Grail. ■. (Alfred Nutt, The 
Legend of the Holy Grail, 67, 93.) Malory gives his history in Books 
xi-xvii, and Tennyson in " The Holy Grail." The Grail, originally a 
resuscitation vessel in Celtic mythology, became, under churchly influ- 
ence, the cup from which our Saviour drank at the Last Supper, and 
in which His blood was caught by Joseph of Arimathea, during or after 
the crucifixion (Nutt, 70, 185, 224); it was visible only to the pure in 



NORTHERN FARMER. OLD STYLE 



399 



heart, and " symbolises the union of man with the divine." (Maccallum, 
Tennysoti's Idylls and Arthurian Story, 74.) The word is derived from 
med. Lat. graddlis, a bowl. Tennyson's poem should be compared 
with William Morris's " Sir Galahad," in The Defence of Guenevere. 

The metre is in general the same as that of " St. Agnes' Eve," but 
with two subtle and most effective variations: 11. 6, 10, 12 in each 
stanza are lengthened from three to four stresses ; and 1. 9 is left 
unrhymed, while 1. 11 takes an internal rhyme. The versification is 
singularly perfect, and there is but one approximate rhyme (61-63). 

131 11, 12. Cf. " The Holy Grail," 346-349. 

132 27-36. Possibly suggested by Malory, xiii, 17 and 18. (Cf. xvii, 
9 and 12.) 

132 31. The seats in the choir and chancel are empty and the 
doors are wide open. 

132 38. Magic bark: Cf. Malory, xvi, 17; xvii, 2, 13, 14 and 21 ; 
"The Holy Grail," 514, 799; Faerie Qtieene, ii, 6, 5. 

132 41-48. Cf. "The Holy Grail," 108-123, 472-476. 

132 51. There was an old superstition that the cock crows all the 
night before Christmas to drive away evil spirits. See Hamlet, i, i, 
158-164. 

133 53. Leads : roofs covered with sheets of lead. 

133 54. Springs: From 1842 to 1851 the reading was spins. 

133 69-72. This experience, which Tennyson had passed through 
himself (See on "The Ancient Sage," 229), is, in "The Holy Grail,'' 
907-915, transferrer^ to King Arthur. 

NORTHERN FARMER. Old Style. (Page 134) 

This dialect poem, a study of humourous Lincolnshire character, was 
written in February 1861 {Mem., I, 471), and published in Etioch Arden, 
etc., 1864. Tennyson said, " Roden Noel calls these two poems [i.e., 
the two " Northern Farmers "] ' photographs,' but they are imaginative. 
The first is founded on the dying words of a farm-bailiff, as reported to 
me by a great uncle of mine when verging upon 80, — ' God A'mighty 
little knows what He 's about, a-taking me [1. 45]. An' Squire will be 
so mad an' all' [1. 47]. I conjectured the man from that one saying." 
{Mem., II, 9.) The manner of man here depicted is already extinct, 
and the dialect is rapidly dying out. Of the dialect notes appended, 
some are given by Tennyson, some by Palgrave. The spelling of words 
has been greatly altered since the original publication. 



400 



NOTES 



The metre is practically the same as that of " In the Children's 
Hospital," but here the lines are regularly arranged in quatrains. 
134 1. 'Asta bean : hast thou been. Liggin' : lying. 
134 3. Moant 'a : may not have. 
134 7. Point: pint. 

134 10. You: Pronounce oic 2.^ m. hour. 'Iss6n : himself. 
134 11. Towd: told. Hond : hand. 
134 13. Larn'd a ma' bea : learned he may be. 
134 14. A cast oop : he brought up against me. Barne : child. 

134 16. Raate : the poor tax. 

135 18. Buzzard-clock : cockchafer. Cf. " Sonnet to J. M. K.," 
" The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone." 

135 23. 'Siver: however. 

135 27. Summun : David. See Psahn cxvi, 11. 

135 28. Stubb'd : broken up for cultivation. 

135 30. Boggle : bogie, ghost. 

135 31. Butter-bump: bittern. 

135 32. Raaved an' rembled : tore up and threw away. 

135 33. Reaper's it wur : it was the gamekeeper's ghost. 

135 34. 'Enemies : anemones. 

136 35. Toaner : one or other. 
136 36. At 'soize: at the assizes. 
136 37. Dubbut : do but. 

136 40. Fourscoor : Pronounce on as in hout-. Yows : ewes. Seead : 
clover. 

136 42. Ta-year: this year. Thruff : through. 

136 43. 'Ud nobbut : would only. 

136 48. Michaelmas: September 29. 

136 49. In 1864 the line read: A mowt a tadken Joanes, as \int a 
""adpoth (?' sense. 

136 52. Cauve : calve. Hoalms : holms, low flat land on the banks 
of a stream. 

137 53. Quoloty : quality, the gentry. 

137 54. Thess^n: themselves. Sewer-loy: surely. 

137 58. Howd: hold. 

137 60. Naw, nor replaced Noither, the original reading. 

137 61. Kittle: boiler. The steam threshing-machine was intro- 
duced in Lincolnshire in 1848. This dates approximately the passing 
of the " old-style " farmer. 

137 62. Huzzin' an' maazin' : worrying and astonishing. 



NORTHERN FARMER. NEW STYLE 



401 



137 63. Thaw replaced a7i\ the original reading. 

137 64. Sin' replaced ^/« (1864). 

137 65. Atta : art thou. 

137 66. 'Toattler: teetotaler. A 's hallus i' the owd taale: is 

always telling the same story. 

137 67. Floy: fly. 

137 68. If replaced ^/« (1864). 

NORTHERN FARMER. New Style. (Page 138) 

This poem, published in The Holy Grail volume of 1869, is a self- 
portrait of the independent farmer of large holdings who succeeded the 
old-style manager. It grew out of a single sentence which Tennyson had 
heard was a favourite saying of a rich neighbour, " When I canters my 
'erse along the ramper (highway) I 'ears proputty, proputty, proputty." 
{Mem., II, 9.) The dialect is nearly the same as in the preceding poem, 
only a little less pronounced, but the characters are very different. The 
verse is identical, with a delightful bit of onomatopoeia in 1. 2, etc. 
Tennyson read this poem aloud with immense humour and with the 
broadest accent. 

138 ]. 'Erse: horse. 

138 7. Toweeak: this week. 

138 14. Cells: girls. 

139 15. Wot 's a beauty ? — the flower as blaws : Cf. Isaiah, xxviii, 
i; Psalm ciii, 15; and Burns's " Fley for a lass wi' a tocher," a song 
which the farmer would have sung had he been Scotch, " Your beauty 's 
a flower in the morning that blows." 

139 17. Stunt: obstinate. 

139 24. As 'ant nowt : that has nothing. 

139 25. Weant 'a : will not have. 

139 26. Addle: earn. 

139 27. Git hiss^n clear was, in 1 869, ^z/ «^zw ''igher. The change 
was made for the sake of the rhyme, when shire in the next line became 
shere. 

139 30. Shut on : clear of. 

139 31. When once a sheep gets on its back, it must lie so, until 
some one turns it on all-fours. I' the grip: in the draining ditch. 

139 32. Far-welter'd : or fow-weltered, said of a sheep lying on its 
back. 

140 38. Burn: born. 



402 NOTES 

140 39. Mays nowt : makes nothing. 

140 40. The bees is as fell as owt : the flies are as fierce as anything 

140 41. Esh: ash. 

140 45-48. Says honest Wilkin Flammock in Scott's Betrothed, ch. 
xxvi, " He that is poor will murder his father for money. I hate poor 
people, and I would the devil had every man who cannot keep himself 
by the work of his own hand." 

140 52. Tued an' moil'd : tugged and drudged. 

141 53. Beck: brook. 

141 54. Feyther run oop : i.e., his land ran up. 
141 55. Brig: bridge. 

LOCKSLEY HALL (Page 141) 

Printed in 1842. Tennyson said, " ' Locksley Hall ' is an imaginary 
place (tho' the coast is Lincolnshire) and the hero is imaginary. The 
whole poem represents young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its 
yearnings." {Mem., I, 195.) The sequel, " Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After" (1886), shows the same character interpreting the story of Amy 
and her husband, no longer with youthful jealousy, but with mature 
friendship, and at the same time, in his views of human progress, giv- 
ing way to those "moods of despondency which are caused by the 
decreased energy of life." {Mevi., II, 329.) See The Poetry of Tenny- 
son, 280-293. 

The suggestion came partly from Sir WilUam Jones's prose version 
of the Modllakdt, the seven Arabic poems which were written in the 
sixth and seventh centuries a.d., and which were traditionally — and, 
in all probabiUty, falsely — represented as having been suspended on 
the Kaaba at Mecca. Five of these (viz., the poems of Amriolkais, 
Tarafa, Zohair, Lebeid, and Antara) begin with the lamentation of a 
lover over the abandoned home of a fair one. The resemblance of 
the first to -Locksley Hall" is indicated in the "Argument" which 
Sn- William Jones prefixed to his translation : — " The poet, after the 
manner of his countrymen, supposes 'himself accompanied on a journey 
by a company of friends; and, as they pass near a place, where his 
mistress had lately dwelled, but from which her tribe was then removed, 
he desires them to stop awhile, that he might indulge the painful 
pleasure of weeping over the deserted remains of her tent," etc. It 
concludes with a picture of a great storm. See E. Koeppel, "Tenny- 
soniana," in Englische Studien, XXVIII, 400-406. Koeppel thinks that 



LOCKSLEY HALL 403 

Tennyson may have imitated the metre of the Arabic original ; so also 
Lyall, p. 50. 

The metre is eight-stress trochaic rhymed couplets. The light syl- 
lable of the eighth bar is omitted. The strong beat on the first syllable 
of each bar, the prolonged hnes, the final syllables standing alone and 
bearing the full emphasis of the rhyme, give a buoyant, spirited, gallop- 
ing motion to the verse. Note that the couplets cannot be arranged 
as quatrains with fines of eight and seven syllables, and alternate 
rhymes. We can do it with the first three couplets ; but with the 
fourth it becomes difficult, and when we come to the eighth it is clearly 
absurd. The normal scheme of the verse is given in the first fine : the 
pause, or caesura, comes at the end of the fourth bar; the last word is 
a long monosyllable. Variations in the pause are as follows : — 

a. Middle of 4th bar; strong emphasis on syllable before pause: 16, 

31, Z3^ 42, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 68, 70, ^2,^ 78, 79, 88, 89, 92, 100, 112,' 
120, 128, 129, 132, 135, 147, 151, 170, 171, 183, 189. 

b. End of 3d bar; used generally when the second section of the 

verse has the present participle and a prolonged movement : 46, 
85, 144, 161, 164, 172. 

c. End of 5th bar: 7, 97, 113, 160. 

d. Middle of 3d bar; same effect as « : 21, 34, 62, 118. 

e. End of 2d bar; same effect as b: 45, 49, 69. 
/ Middle of 2d bar: 27, 64. 

g. Double pause: 34, ^, and normal; 153, normal, andr; 194, normal, 

and end of 6th bar. 
h. Triple pause ; marked emphasis : 23, middle of 2d bar, normal, and 

middle of 5th bar; 193,/ a, and middle of 5th bar. 

There are 97 rhymes ; the following are approximate : 63-64, 67-68, 
71-72, 91-92, 101-102, 117-118, 155-156, 179-180.' This is in the pro- 
portion of one in twelve. Comparing it with couplet-poems by other 
masters of English verse, we find that Dryden's Absalom and Achito- 
phel has one defective rhyme in seven ; Shelley's " Lines among the 
Euganean Hills," one in six ; and Wordsworth's *' Song at the Feast 
of Brougham Castle," one in nine. Perfect accuracy of rhyme is, of 
course, not essential to excellence in English poetiy. Tennyson ranks 
high in this branch of technique, though not so high as Milton or 
Pope. 

The style, in contrast with " Mariana " or " The Lady of Shalott," is 
aggressively modern ; full of allusions to recent discoveries in astronomy, 



e. 



404 



NOTES 



electricity, sociology ; yet it does not lose the romantic feeling ; it 
is individual, passionate, heightened and coloured by emotion. The 
language is very tropical. The following instances may be taken as 
representative. Sitnile : lo, 13, 26, 79, 114, 135, 140, 152, 180. Meta- 
phor: 12, 24, 27, 42, 65, 76, 106, 133, 134, 146. Allegory: 31-34, 121- 
128. Personification: 106, 108, 130, 136, 143, 178. Irony: 51-55. 
Hyperbole: 56, 66, 133, iSo. 

141 3. All around it replaced in 1 843 round the gables. 

141 4. Dreary gleams . . . flying: rays of sunlight struggling 
through the flying clouds. The construction is absolute, "while 
dreary gleams . . . fly," etc. (See Mem., II, 93.) 

141 5. In the distance : the original and final reading. Half in 
ruin is the reading in the Selection of 1865. 

141 8. Sloping : The word is generally used to describe a line ; 
Tennyson frequently uses it to describe a movement. Cf. " Mari- 
ana," 80. 

141 9. Cf. Modllakdt, Amriolkais, 23 : " It was the hour when 
the Pleiads appeared in the firmament, like the folds of a silken sash 
variously decked with gems." 

142 14. Closed: inclosed. Cf. "Gardener's Daughter," 13. 
142 17-20. Cf. Pervigilium Veneris., 2, 3 : — 

" Ver novum, ver iam canorum ; vere natus orbis est, 
Vera concordant amores, vere nubent alites." 

142 18. Lapwing : Vanellus cristatus, the " tufted plover" of " The 
May Queen," 62. 

142 19. Iris : The rainbow colours on the dove's neck are brighter 
in the mating season. 

142 26. A very imperfect line metrically. 

143 31, 32. Cf. Goethe's epigram, " Zeitmass," and W. R. Spencer's 
" To the Lady Anne Hamilton " : — 

" And who with clear account remarks 
The ebbing of his glass, 
When all the sands are diamond sparks 
That dazzle as they pass." 

143 33, 34. Tennyson told Phillips Brooks that this was his best 
simile {sic). {Mem., II, 296.) His doctrine of love is that when it is 
true it conquers selfishness. Cf. Maud, I, xviii, 40-44 ; II, ii, 74-83. 



LOCKSLEY HALL 



405 



143 37. The stately ships : Cf. " Break, break, break," 9. 

143 38. Cf. The Princess, vii, 143, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, 
iv, " When soul meets soul on lovers' lips." Parsons also cites Schiller's 
Die Rduber, iii, i : — 

" Seine Kiisse — paradiesisch Fiihlen ! 



Stiirzten, flogen, rasten Geist unci Geist zusammen, 
Lippen, Wangen brannten, zitterten, — 
Seele rann in Seele." 

After this follow in the original MS. the two couplets which later became 
the nucleus of " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" (13-16). 

143 43. Decline : lower thyself. Cf. Hamlet, i, 5, 50. 

145 68. The many-winter'd crow: Cf. Horace, Odes, iii, 17, 13, 
"annosa cornix," and Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," 17, 
" thou treble-dated crow." But the crow here is the rook, the poet pre- 
ferring to adopt the provincial name rather than use " rook " twice in 
the same sentence. (See his letter quoted by Watts in The Ni?teteenth 
Century, May 1893.) 

145 75. The poet : Many poets have expressed the thought, but 
Dante is meant {Ifif., v, 1 21-123): — 

" Nessun maggior dolore, 
che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
nella miseria." 

Dante took it from Boethius, lib. ii, prosa 4. 

145 79. Like a dog, he hunts in dreams : See " Lucretius," 44 ff ., and 
note. 

146 104. The winds are laid with sound: alluding to the once 
prevalent belief that the discharge of ordnance during a battle repels 
the regular currents of air. See Cooper's Two Admirals, ch. xxvii. 

147 121. Argosies : merchant vessels ; originally the large and richly 
freighted ships of Ragusa. 

148 129. Common sense of most : Cf. Idylls, — " To the Queen," 
61, "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," 32. 

148 133. Out of joint: Cf. Hamlet, i, 5, 189. 

148 135, 136. Cf. Thos. Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South 
Africa (1834, p. 39), which Tennyson read in 1837: "About midnight 
we were suddenly roused by the roar of a Hon close to our tents. It 
was so loud and tremendous that for a moment I actually thought a 



406 NOTES 

thunder-storm had burst upon us. . . . We roused up the haK- 
extmguished fire to a roaring blaze," etc. Tennyson turns the inci- 
dent into a simile of the dangerous growth of democracy, felt in the 
discontent which preceded the Revolution of 1848. 

148 138. Process of the suns : passage of time. 

148 141. Knowledge . . . Wisdom: For the distinction cf. "Love 
and Duty," 23-25 ; In Mej?i., cxiv ; Cow'per's Task, vi, 88-97. 

148 142. The individual withers : The revolution at the close of 
the eighteenth century asserted chiefly individual liberty ; that in the 
second quarter of the nineteenth was an assertion of the rights of the 
community against the evils of individualism. The social movement 
had begun. 

149 150. Motions : impulses, as often in Shakespeare. 

149 153. Cf. Beaumont and Fletcher, Fhilaster, iv, 2, 36-48. 

149 155. Mahratta-battle : The Mahrattas are the inhabitants of 
Maharashtra, a district of central and western India. They fought the 
English in 1775-1778, in 1803, and in 1816-1818. Perhaps the second 
war, in which Wellesley (Wellington) was the English general, is here 
meant. 

149 160. After this in the first, unpublished edition of the poem : — 

All about a summer ocean, leagues on leagues of golden calm, 
And within melodious waters rolling round the knolls of palm. 

The couplet is singularly beautiful, but was omitted lest the poem should 
be clogged with description. 

150 162. Swings was substituted for droops in 1S51. Note the 
effectiveness of verbs of motion. 

151 180. Joshua's moon in Ajalon: Ci.Josh.,y., 12. 

151 181. Beacons (from O.E. beacn, a sign): kindles a signal for 
advance. Cf. Browning, Paracelsus, " Some one truth would dimly 
beacon me . . . Into assured light." 

151 182. Great world replaced in 1 843 /,?i)//^j-. "When I went by 
the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830), I thought that the 
wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night and there was such a 
vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the 
wheels. Then I made this line." (Tennyson in Mem., I, 195.) 

151 183. Globe replaced in 1843 world, because of the change in 182. 

151 185. Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) : Never having known 
his own mother, he calls upon the spirit of the age (the Zeitgeist) to 
comfort him with promises of progress. 



LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE 407 

151 186. Weigh the sun : Probably refers to the experiments car- 
ried out by Francis Baily (i 838-1 842) for determining the mean density 
of the earth, and so also the weight of the sun. 

151 191. Holt: small wood or grove (O.E.). 



LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE (Page 152) 

Written in 1833; published in 1842. It is a dramatic lyric of much 
verve, and won instant popularity because current republican sympathies 
were expressed in it with personal passion and rhetorical force. 

The poem is written in eight-line stanzas of four-stress iambic verse. 
The rhymes are alternate. The fifth line of each stanza (except the 
last) takes an internal rhyme ; this quickens the movement and enlivens 
the scorn. The repeated apostrophe serves for refrain. 

152 23. Scrivelsby Court, the seat of the Marmions, near Somersby, 
has a lion-guarded entrance-gate. (Napier, p. 98.) Cf. " Enoch Arden," 
98; Maud, I, xiv, 7 ; " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 213. 

153 27. Branching limes : Cf. " The Gardener's Daughter," 46. 
153 51. The gardener Adam : the original and final reading ; in 

1845 3-"^ ^"^^ thirty years after. The grand old gardener — which was 
ambiguous. See The Poetry of Temtyson, p. 256. 

153 54. Cf. " Win if re da " (in Percy's Reliques), "And to be noble, 
we '11 be good " ; also, Juvenal, Sat. viii, 20, " Nobilitas sola est atque 
unica virtus." 

154 56. Norman blood : Tennyson himself was of Norman descent. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD; A MONODRAMA (Page 155) 

Part II, Section IV, was written as early as 1834 {Mem., I, 139), and 
was published in 1837 in The Tribute, a volume made up by Lord 
Northampton for the aid of a sick clergyman. (See Wemyss Reid, 
Life of Lord Houghton, I, 1 77-181.) At the suggestion of Sir John 
Simeon, the poet undertook to write a story around this fragment, and 
Maud gradually grew out of the endeavour. {Mem., I, 379.) This was 
at Farringford in 1854 and 1855, and the poem was published in the 
latter year. The second edition •(1856) contains many changes and 
additions. 

The theme is the conquest of selfishness by love. The unnamed 
hero is a lonely morbid young man, tainted with hereditary insanity. 



408 NOTES 

whose vision distorts all nature and humanity. Against his will he 
falls in love with Maud, the daughter of the man whom he considers 
the cause of all his wrongs, but this resisted passion becomes in time 
the redeeming power of his life. Forced into a duel, he kills Maud's 
brother, and flies to Brittany. The news of Maud's death drives him 
mad. He is finally restored under the influence of her love and the 
noble emotions kindled by the Crimean War. Maud is, as Tennyson 
called it, a "monodrama": it is distinguished from other dramas by 
the circumstance that " different phases of passion in one person take 
the place of different characters." Each section is a stage in the 
hero's development. Only those are given here which are distinct 
lyrics. Tennyson was fond of reading Maud aloud in a sort of rhyth- 
mical chant. {Mem., I, 395-398; The Poetry of Tennyson, 121-128.) 



Part I 
V (Page 155) 

Unwilling love is awakened by the "clarion call" of Maud's voice. 
The verse is a free measure of three, four, or five stresses to the line, 
with the rhymes irregularly arranged. Tennyson prided himself on the 
flexible rhythms of Maud {Mem., I, 341), but the rule-of -thumb critics 
found them difficult to scan. 

155 1. Cedar tree : Under a cedar at Swainston, Sir John Simeon's 
place near Farringford, much of Maud is said to have been written. 

155 5. Like a trumpet's call: Cf. Sidney, Defense of Poesie (Athe- 
naeum Press edition, p. 29). " I never heard the old song of Percy and 
Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." 

155 14. Cf. I, xxii, 41, and The Princess, iii, 340. 

XI (Page 156) 

This section expresses the hero's longing for love. " For thrilling 
effect these deprecatory stanzas must be admitted to stand almost 
alone in the annals of poetry." (R. J. Mann, Maud Vindicated, p. 30.) 
A fac-simile of the original MS. is given in Metn., I, 392. Each stanza 
consists of a quatrain of three-stress iambic verse, with interwoven 
rhyme, followed by a burthen of which the second line changes. The 
feminine rhyme of 9-1 1 introduces a subtle and pathetic variation. 

156 5. Come what come may : so Shakespeare in Macbeth, i, 3, 146. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 409 



XII (Page 156) 

An interview with Maud. The birds are partisans of the characters : 
the caw of the rooks in the Hall garden (1-4; 25-28) summons Maud 
to the suitor whom her brother favours ; but the little songsters of the 
lover's woods exult in her presence (9-12). 

The quatrains have an irregular rhythm and alternate double rhymes, 
one of which is very poor (10-12). 

157 11. Here, here, here: Cf. "The Throstle," 13. 

157 17. As he had done in I, iv, 16, 17. 

157 23, 24. The underside of the English daisy has crimson florets. 
These are upturned by the passing foot. Cf. In Mem., Ixxii, 11, 12. 

158 30. King Charley snarling. In 1855: King Charles is S7iarl- 
ijtg, which had too many sibilants. " King Charley " is, of course, a 
spaniel. 

XVII (Page 158) 

The consciousness that his love is returned gives a roseate tinge 
to all the world. The measure is three-stress trochaic, the light syllable 
of the last foot omitted. The twenty-eight lines are woven together by 
alternate rhymes and repeated words. LI. 5-8 are repeated at the end 
of the poem. 

158 12. Over glowing was substituted in 1872 for O'er the blowing. 



XVIII (Page 159) 

Tennyson's note is, " Happy. The sigh in the cedar branches seems 
to chime in with [the lover's] own yearning." {Mem., I, 404.) His 
voice would break down when he read this section, because the 
intensity of joy approaches sadness. In Mayor's opinion (p. 136) it is 
" perhaps the most perfect example of the flowing richness of Tenny- 
son's rhythm." The metre rises and falls, expands and contracts, with 
a freedom of accent, cadence, and rhyme, which seems lawless, but is 
really obedient to inner command of feeling. The general movement 
is iambic. 

159 8. A celebrated description, perfect in tone-colour, of the sound 
made by the wind among laurel leaves. Laurels line the walks at 
Farringford. (Napier, p. 175.) 

159 12. Gates of Heaven: Cf. Rev., xxi, 21. 

160 21. Honey'drain: Cf. " Lycidas," 140, " honeyed showers." 



410 NOTES 

160 27. The thornless garden : See Genesis, iii, i8. 

160 32 £f. I.e., I am happier now than when I thought the ignorance 
of the common labourer a better lot than the knowledge, taught by 
modern science, of an all but infinite universe governed by mechanical 
laws, without intelligence or love for man. 

160 36. A sad astrology: " modem astronomy, for of old astrology 
was thought to sympathize with and rule man's fate." (Tennyson's 
note, given to his son. Mem., I, 404.) 

160 40. Cf. Psalm viii, 3, 4; Lucretius, De Rer. Nat., v, 1204 ff.; 
In Mem., in:, "Despair," 15-20; " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 
201-204; "Vastness." 

161 53. " The central idea [of Maud], the Holy power of Love." 
(Tennyson's note.) 

161 55 ff. I.e., the idea of death and separation intensifies love. 
So, the drinker's pleasure is made more importunate by the fear that 
all pleasure ends with this life. Cf. "The Ancient Sage," 17. "Let 
us eat and drink, for to morrow we die " is the staple sentiment of 
convivial songs. But Tennyson is thinking also of immortality as the 
crown of love. (Cf. In Mem., xxxv.) 

161 58. Loving replaced in 1884 loner's. The poet did not wish 
to leave it doubtful whether the lover or the kiss was long. 

161 60. Dusky strand : " image from the coloured line sometimes 
woven into ropes." (Palgrave.) 

161, 162 62-85. In this strophe, out of 194 words, 164 are mono- 
syllables. 

161 68. False death: sleep. Cf. /« Mem., Ixviii, 2, and Cymbeline, 
ii, 2, 31, "O sleep, thou ape of death." 

162 74. My ownest replaced in 1872 and ownest. 



XXII (Page 162) 

The dawn-song of the hero in the Hall garden, where Maud has 
promised to meet him after " a grand political dinner " and dance. 
His passion transforms and informs nature. Ruskin cited it as an 
" exquisite " instance of the pathetic fallacy, but the fallacy is itself 
true to the lover's character. Compare the garden-song in The Princess, 
where the flowers sleep, as here they wake, in sympathy. 

The metre is curiously anticipated in Dryden's " Song of a Scholar 
and his Mistress." (Globe, p. 385.) The lines, of anapaestic cadence, 
are grouped in stanzas of six or eight lines, with interwoven rhyme. 



SELECTIONS FROM MAUD 411 

In stanzas i, ii, x, and xi, three-stress lines prevail. From iii to ix 
lines of four stresses and three stresses regularly alternate. Every device 
is brought into service: onomatopoeia, 13-16; alliteration, 25, 63-66; 
subtle repetition, 9-12, 69-71 ; internal rhyme, 27. 

162 6. Rose is replaced in 1872 roses. 

162 8. The planet of Love: Venus. Cf. "A Dream of Fair 
Women," 263. 

164 41, 42. Cf. Butler, Hiidibras, Pt. II, Canto i, 571 : — 

" Where'er you tread, youK foot shall set 
The primrose and the violet." 

164 45. Acacia : the North American locust-tree, with sweet-scented 
white flowers, grown as an ornamental tree in England. 

164 48. Pimpernel : Anagallis arvensis, of the primrose family. 
Dozed probably refers to the closing of its little scarlet flowers ; so, 
perhaps, the larkspur "listens" (65), because of its ear-like hoods. 

164 56. Lily and rose: Cf. Beckel, v, 2, 140-142, "The Ancient 
Sage," 1 59-161. 

Part II 
II (Page 165) 

On the coast of Brittany, after the duel with Maud's brother. " The 
shell undestroyed amid the storm perhaps symbolizes to him his own 
first and highest nature preserved amid the storms of passion." (Tenny- 
son's note.) 

The metre is irregular; each line (except 14 and 19) has three stresses. 

165 11, 12. Cf. Romeo and Juliet, ii, 2, 43, 44. 

III (Page 166) 

This little lyric, added in 1856, contains in quintessence the tragedy 
of death and imminent madness. It was one of Tennyson's seven 
favourite "songs of the deeper kind." The metre is three- and four- 
stress iambic. Noticeable are the extra-syllables in 1. 8. 

IV (Page 167) 

77/,? Tribute version is printed here, because the Maud version loses 
by extraction from the context. Tennyson agreed with Jowett that it 



412 



NOTES 



was "the most touching of his works" {Mefji., II, 466), and Swinburne 
called it " the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and 
melody ever written even by Mr. Tennyson." ( The Academy, Jan. 29, 
1876.) 

Strophes v-vii and xi-xvi are in trochaic four-stress verse. The 
others are irregular, with three-stress lines acting as wheels. The 
rhymes follow no fixed plan. Many lines are left unrhymed. L. 45 
has an internal rhyme. 

167 13-16. Cf. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, iv, 2, 27-30: — 

" O, that it were possible we might 
But hold some two days' conference with the dead ! 
From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure, 
I never shall know here." 

168 33. Shuddering dawn : Collins compares Marston,^«/^«/^««i/ 
Mellida, pt. I, iii, i, i, "Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn." 

169 68. He does not wish his remembrance of her, as he knew her 
in the old happy days, to be confused by a phantom with all the horrors 
of the grave. 

169 69. Cf. In Mem., xcii, 1-3. 

169 71. Cf. In Mem., xciii, 5-8. 

170 90. A phantom of the mind : an image formed by the volun- 
tary exercise of memory, of which her real Spirit (71) in heaven is the 
Archetype (107). With this is contrasted the involuntary and ghastly 
hallucination projected by his diseased brain (69, 70, 83, 84). 



RIZPAH (Page 171) 

This dramatic lyric appeared in Ballads, 1880. Mr. A. C. Swin- 
burne says that if all the rest of the author's works were destroyed, 
this alone would at once place him among the first of the world's poets. 
{^Miscellanies, p. 221.) Mr. E. C. Stedman says, "The passion and 
lyrical might of Rizpah never have been excelled by the author, nor, I 
think, by any other poet of his day." ( Victorian Poets, p. 420.) 

The poem is a study of maternal love under these conditions: (i) 
ignorance, (2) cruel injustice of the law, (3) madness, which unseats 
the reason but not the mother-instinct. An old peasant woman tells 
a lady visitor, who has come to pray with her, the story of her only 
boy who was hanged in chains for highway robbery, according to the 
English law, which was in force down to 1783. This story Tennyson 



RIZPAH 413 

saw in a penny magazine called Old Brightoji, lent him by his neigh- 
bour at Farringford, Mrs. Brotherton. {Mem., II, 249-251.) A certain 
Phcebe Hessel " obtained such information as led to the arrest and con- 
viction of Rooke and Howell for robbing the mail, a circumstance which 
made a considerable sensation at the close of the last century. They 
were gibbeted on the spot where the robbery was committed, and there 
is an affecting story connected with the body of Rooke. When the 
elements had caused the clothes and flesh to decay, his aged mother, 
night after night, in all weathers, and the more tempestuous the 
weather the more frequent the visits, made a sacred pilgrimage to the 
lonely spot on the Downs, and it was noticed that on her return she 
always brought something away wdth her in her apron. Upon being 
watched it was discovered that the bones of the hanging man were the 
objects of her search, and as the wind and rain scattered them on the 
ground she conveyed them to her home. There she kept them, and, 
when the gibbet was stripped of its horrid burden, in the dead silence 
of the night she interred them in the hallowed enclosure of Old Shore- 
ham Churchyard. What a sad story of a Brighton Rizpah ! " For the 
title, see 2 Sanmel, xxi, 8-10. {The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 260.) 

The metre is in general the same as that of " In the Children's 
Hospital." There are no false or approximate rhymes. The style is 
what Wordsworth called " the language of common life." 

171 4. Downs : bare, undulating, chalk uplands. 

171 11. Here, for the first time, she notices her visitor. 

171 12. As the tree falls, etc. : Cf. Ecdesiastes, xi, 3. 

173 38. The gallows stood on the coast. Mr. Stopford Brooke 
remarks on " the dreadful shame, struck into that splendid line." 
{Tennyson, p. 446.) 

174 51. Flesh of my flesh : Cf. Genesis, ii, 23. The intensity of this 
stanza is not surpassed by anything in literature ; it is a cry out of the 
heart of life. 

174 54. Side: The word is used in the same sense by Milton 
("Comus," 1009), and Shelley (Dedication of The Revolt of Islam, ix). 

174 57. Trumpet of judgment : Cf. i Thessalonians,\v, 16. 

175 62. Full of compassion, etc. : Cf . Psalm Ixxxvi, 1 5. 

175 65. The black cap: The "English judge puts on a black cap 
when about to pass sentence of death upon a prisoner. 

175 66. Cf. Matthew, xix, 30, xx, 16; Mark, x, 31 ; Luke, xiii, 30. 



414 NOTES 

THE PRINCESS, BOOK VII (Page 177) 

For details regarding date of composition and publication see the 
introductory note to "Songs from The Princess" (p. 319). The main 
drift of the story of the poem to the beginning of Book vii is as fol- 
lows : — The unnamed Northern Prince who acts as narrator has been 
betrothed, since childhood, to the Southern Princess Ida, and has wor- 
shipped her afar off as a boy's ideal. When the time comes for the com- 
pact to be fulfilled, the Princess declines to wed, for she has founded a 
university where women are to be educated in complete seclusion from 
men. The Prince, with two companions, disguises himself as a girl stu- 
dent and gains admission to the college. By a humourous contretemps 
they are detected and thrust forth in ignominy, though the Prince has 
found an opportunity to save Ida's life. Meanwhile the Prince's father 
has invested the college with an army, and the three huge warrior broth- 
ers of the Princess have come to her defence. They resolve to settle 
the dispute by a combat of fifty on a side. In this tourney the Prince's 
party is defeated, and he and many others are wounded. Ida, touched 
by pity for the Prince and his anxious father, surrenders her proud pur- 
pose, and throws open the college doors to the wounded of both armies. 
Here Book vii begins. 

The Princess is called "A Medley," partly because of its manner of 
narration — each Book being told professedly by a different person; 
partly because of its confusing anachronisms, its commingling of medise- 
val and modem customs and ideas ; partly because of its varying tones 
— now serious, now mock-heroic, and so "moving in a strange diago- 
nal." In Book vii the mixture of half-jest gives place to almost entire 
earnestness. 

"It is true," said Tennyson {Mem.^ I, 251), "that some of the blank 
verse in this poem is among the best I ever wrote" ; he cited vii, 20-26, 
330-342. But he did not regard it as among his best poems. This 
Book, being mainly conversational and offering few opportunities for 
imitative effects, is marked by comparative regularity. An extra, or 
feminine, syllable before the caesura is found in 11. 10, 11, iii. The 
transposed stress is frequent at the beginning of the line ; it occurs in 
the third bar in 34, 209, 230, 247, 280, 289, 290, etc. ; in the fourth bar 
in 210, 229, etc. L. 290 shows the rare case of a paragraph ending on 
the first syllable of a line, which thus receives a very heavy emphasis. 
Cf. 100. The chief beauty of the verse arises from the simple flow of 



THE PRINCESS 415 

melodious words and the harmonious variation of. the pauses. Note 
the onomatopoeia in 89, and the repetition in 80-97. 

177 19. Void was her use : her life was emptied of its old habits 
and occupations. Cf. "Aylmer's Field," 566, " her charitable use." 

177, 178 20 ff. This splendid simile was roughly sketched from " a 
coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon." (Tennyson's letter to 
Dawson.) Cf. Iliad, iv, 275-279. 

178 36. Added, with many other similar passages, in the Fourth 
Edition, 1851. Cf. i, 14-18: — 

Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what; 
On a sudden in the midst of men and day, 
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore, 
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts, 
And feel myself the shadow of a dream. 

" His too emotional temperament was intended from an artistic point 
of view to emphasize his comparative want of power." {Mem., I, 251.) 
The added passages heighten also the unreality and improbability of 
the story. Cf. iii, 169; iv, 538, 548; v, 467. 

178 37. Quite in 1851 replaced Lay, which had followed directly 
upon but I (1. 35). 

179 107 ff. On one side, etc. : The Lex Oppia, passed in B.C. 215, 
provided that no woman should possess more than half an ounce of 
gold, or wear a parti-coloured dress, or ride in a carriage in the city or 
within a mile of it except during public religious ceremonies. Twenty 
years later, the occasion of the law having passed wdth the conclusion 
of the war, the w^omen made a popular demonstration for its repeal. 
Marcus Porcius Cato, the consul, spoke against them, but they won 
their point. See Livy, xxxiv, 1-8. 

179 109, 110. They cramm'd The forum : Cf. Livy, xxxiv, i, 
"Matronae . . . omnis vias urbis aditusque»in forum obsidebant." 

179 111. Dwarf-like. In 1847, 1848 : little. The stronger adjec- 
tive emphasizes the humourous contrast with " Titanic " (1. 109). Cato 
was not a notably small man, and on this occasion he certainly did 
not " cower," but the decorators of the college exaggerated their themes 
to show the superiority of w^omen. Cf. ii, 64 ff. ; iii, 330 ff. ; iv, 207. 

179 111 ff. On the other side, etc.: See Appian, B. C, iv, 32-34. 
In 43 B.C. the Second Triumvirate published an edict requiring 1400 of 
the richest women to make a valuation of their property, and to furnish 
for the service of the w^ar against Brutus and Cassius such portion 



4l6 NOTES 

as should be required of each. The women forced their way to the 
tribunal of the triumvirs in the .forum, and Hortensia, the daughter of 
the famous orator, spoke on their behaK. 

179 119. In 1847, 1848, there were two lines here: — 

Sad phantoms conjured out of circumstance, 

tJhosts of the fading brain, they seem'd ; nor more, etc. 

In 1850, St7-ange replaced Sad. The present reading was adopted in 
1 85 1, save that seem as stood then for look like. 

180 122. Seem'd. Before 1851 : show'd. 

180 140-143. In 1847: — 

She stoop'd; and with a great shock of the heart 
Our mouths met: out of languor leapt a cry, 
Crown'd Passion from the brinks of death, and up 
Along the shuddering senses struck the soul, 
And closed on fire with Ida's at the lips. 

In 1848, Cr^w«Vwas replaced h^ Leapt. The final reading has greater 
compression but less passion. L. 142 was added in 1851 ; the rest 
dates from 1850. Cf. " Locksley Hall," 38. 

180, 181 148 ff. That other, etc. : This lovely picture of the new- 
bom Aphrodite, which is expanded by the poet to undramatic length, is 
based upon the shorter Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite., 3-ii- 

181 152. Cf. " The Palace of Art," 1833 version, st. xv : — 

Or Venus in a snowy shell alone, 

Deepshadowed in the glassy brine, 
Moonlike glowed double on the blue, and shone 
A naked shape divine. 

181 153. Her Graces: See the longer Hym?i, 61. In the shorter 
one, it is the Hours who await to robe her. 

181 160. Here the Princess reads the " Serenade " and the " Small 
Sweet Idyl," which, in this edition, are found on pp. 13, 14. 

181 221, 222. Sought . . . knowledge : the real defect of the Prin- 
cess's scheme of education. Cf. i, 134: — 

Knowledge, so my daughter held, 
Was all in all. 

182 234-237. " When the dawn of love in the Princess's heart is 
beginning, the early dawn of nature to which he compares it was never 



THE PRINCESS 417 

more fully or more tenderly imagined than in these lines of lovely 
simplicity." (Brooke, Tennyson, p. 160.) 

182 244. Bond or free: Cf. i Cor., xii, 13. 

182 245. Lethe: the river of oblivion in Hades (^^«<?zdf,vi, 748-751'; 
"Two Voices," 350; In Mem., xliv, 10) ; here, the period of forgetful- 
ness before birth. 

182 248. Generally interpreted as " Controls all the children of the 
earth " (as we say, "young America"), but this is not in line with the 
context. Perhaps it is better to paraphrase thus : " Sustains this lovely 
world, still in the dawn of its development." Cf. " Conclusion," 77 : — 

This fine old world of ours is but a child 
Yet in the go-cart. 

182 250-256. In 1847 and 1848: — 

How shall men grow ? We two will serve them both 

In aiding her, strip off, as in us lies, 

(Our place is much) the parasitic forms 

That seem to keep her up but drag her down — 

Will leave her field to burgeon and to bloom 

From all within her, make herself her own," etc. 

The revised form of the first line emphasizes the main teaching of 
The Princess, and the whole passage is now smoother in verse and less 
encumbered in construction. 

182 255. Burgeon : bud ; an old word revived by Scott in The Lady 
of the Lake, ii, st. 19. Cf. Iji Mem., cxv, 2. 

183 261. His in 1850 replaced whose. 

183 265, 266. Cf. "Geraint and Enid," 866; In Mem., cix, 17; and 
" On One who Affected an Effeminate Manner." 

183 268. Replaced, in 1850, Mo7'e as the double-natured Poet each. 

183 270. This simile is turned into a metaphor in " The Ring," 
24-26, and The Foresters, iii, i, ad fin. 

183 271. The skirts of Time : the outskirts of the future. 

183, 184 282-290. These lines express Tennyson's deepest convic- 
tion on the relation of the sexes. (Mein., I, 249.) 

183 283, 284. Cf. Plato, Symposium, 189-196. 

184 298 ff. Tennyson here, as in " Isabel," describes his own mother. 
Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, viii, 546-559 ; Wordsworth, " She was a 
Phantom of Delight," and The Prelude, v, 257-293; Lowell, "My 
Love." 



4l8 NOTES 

184 313. In 1847 and 1848: Said Ida, ''so unlike, so all tmlike — 

184 315-317. I . . . self : inserted in 1851. See note on 36. 

184, 185 319, 320. Between these lines stood, in 1847 ^ri^ 1848 : " Or 
some mysterious or magnetic touch." 

185 323. Pranks of saucy boyhood : his invasion of the college in 
the guise of a girl. 

185 327-329. My doubts are dead in 1851 replaced doubt me no ynore. 
The next two lines were added in the same year. 

185 335. Is morn to more : In 1 847-1850: I scarce believe. 

185 337. Weeds. In 1847, 1848: flowers. 1850: leaves. The 
changes w^ere made to bring the simile into conformity to truth, 
though they leave the passage sHghtly less musical. 

GUINEVERE (Page 186) 

Begun in July 1857, 11. 575-577 being first written. In January 1858 
" The Parting of Arthur and Guinevere " was finished. The song " Too 
late " was written on March 8, and on March 1 5 the poem was finally 
completed. {Mem., I, 419, 424.) It was published wath three other 
poems in 1859, under the title Idylls of the King. On the meaning of 
"Idyll," see The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 161. Subsequently the series 
was enlarged until it contained twelve parts, of which " Guinevere " is 
the eleventh. Tennyson considered it the most perfect. It presents 
the last scenes in the life of Queen Guinevere, w'hose guilty love for 
Lancelot, the greatest of Arthur's knights, is made by Tennyson the 
chief cause of the ruin of the Round Table. For poetic studies on 
the same subject, but with great diversity of treatment, see Thomas 
Hughes's Senecan tragedy. The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587); "The 
Defence of Guenevere " and " King Arthur's Tomb," by William Morris 
(1858) ; " Lanzelot and Genevra," by Wilhelm Hertz (i860) ; and " The 
Farewell of Ganore," by G. A. Simcox (1869). 

With what a free hand Tennyson has recast the legendary material 
may be realized from a summary of Malory's Morte Darthur, Books xx 
and xxi. After the discoveiy of the lovers, the Queen is condemned 
to be burned, but Launcelot and his kin rescue her from the stake and 
carry her off to Joyous Gard. To this strong castle King ArtTiur lays 
siege. By command of the Pope Guenever is restored to her husband. 
Launcelot passes to his estates across the sea, and Arthur follows to 
w^age a second war upon him. In his absence from the realm, Mordred 
usurps the throne. The King returns and fights the fatal battle in the 



GUINEVERE 



419 



west, as related in " The Passing of Arthur." After Arthur's death, 
Guenever retires to the nunnery at Almesbuiy, where she has one last 
meeting with Launcelot. There is nothing to correspond with the final 
interview between Arthur and Guinevere (11. 406 ff.). 

The blank verse is in Tennyson's middle manner, more free and con- 
fident than his early style, and at the same time less loose and daring 
than the versification of the dramas. The stress is repeatedly thrown 
forward upon the first syllable of the bar. This happens most frequently 
in the first bar of the line (e.g., 11. 2, 3, 5) ; often in the third bar (e.g., 
84, 278, 528) ; sometimes in the second (7, 344) or fourth (70, 180, 571) ; 
and even, rarely, in the fifth (432). Two of these trochaic bars occur 
in 11. Ill, 363, 576, etc. Again, in many a bar, the stress is so slight 
as to become almost negligible, and we have almost a counterpart of 
the classical pyrrhic foot ( v^ w) ; e.g., the second and fourth bars in 1. 1 1. 
On the other hand, some bars bear two beats, after the analogy of the 

quantitative spondee ( ) ; e.g., the third bar in 1. 4, or the fifth bar 

in 1. 15. Tennyson said, "In a blank verse you can have from three 
up to eight beats." [Alem., II, 14.) 

There are about 133 run-on lines and 16 feminine endings. Tenny- 
son's favourite place for the internal pause, or caesura, is at the end of 
the second bar. 

Repetition of phrases heightens the effect of unity (11. 130, 161, 166 ff, 
685 ; 212, 223 ; 395, 594). The style offers just a suggestion of archaism 
in the use of such words as " holp " (45), " scape " (345), " ensample " 
(487), and "scathe" (491). 

186 2. Almesbury : Amesbury, in Wiltshire, about seven miles 
from Salisbury. The Benedictine nuns had a house there, and at 
one time many ladies of high rank retired within its walls. A mon- 
astery named after King Ambrosius was supposed to have occupied 
the same site in early British days. 

186 10. In 1859, two lines: — 

Sir Modred; he the nearest to the King, 
His nephew, ever like a subtle beast, etc. 

Sir Modred : in many of the old legends, the incestuous son of Arthur 
and his half-sister. Tennyson rejects this story, denies the relation- 
ship altogether (see 1. 570, "The Passing of Arthur," 155), and lessens 
the importance and dignity of the part played by the traitorous knight 
in the tragedy. See T/ie Poetry of Tennyson, p. 172. In the Idylls 
he is the son of Lot, King of Orkney, and of Bellicent, daughter of 



420 NOTES 

Gorlois and Ygerne. See on 1. 286. He would thus be Arthur's 
nephew, were Arthur really the child of Ygerne and Uther ; but Ten- 
nyson says that Arthur's birth was supernatural, and that a great wave 
washed him up at Merlin's feet. (" The Coming of Arthur," 365 ff.) 
For his character, cf. " The Coming of Arthur," 322 ; " Gareth and 
Lynette," 28-32, 409 ; " Pelleas and Ettarre," 597 ; " The Last Tourna- 
ment," 166; "The Passing of Arthur," 165. This forrn of his name 
is from Geoffrey of Monmouth {Hist. Brit., ix, 9). 

186 15, 16. Lords of the White Horse . . . Hengist : Hengist, the 
leader of the Saxons, came into England with his brother Horsa in 449. 
Both names mean " horse," and there is a tradition that Hengist's 
standard was a white horse, representing the war charger of Woden. 
According to Tacitus (Germania, 10), white horses were held sacred 
by the Teutonic tribes, and remains of the white horses cut by the 
Saxons in the English chalk downs are still visible. Arthur was 
the reputed victor in twelve great battles over the Saxons. (Cf. 
"Lancelot and Elaine," 278-315; "Geraint and Enid," 935; "Holy 
Grail," 312.) 

186 17. The Table Round : first mentioned in literature in Wace's 
Roman de Brut (i 1 55). As a fellowship, it may have been suggested by 
the paladins of Charlemagne. As a table, it may indicate that Arthur's 
was the first court in Britain which sat at meals together, and its shape 
and properties may denote plenty or abundance. (Maccallum, p. 29 ; 
Rhys, p. 9.) In Malory, iii, i, the table descends from Uther to Leode- 
grance, and from him to Arthur, and has seats for 1 50 knights ; but in 
xiv, 2, where he is following a different source, the table is said to have 
been made by Merlin " in tokening of roundness of the world." In the 
Roi7ian de Merlin (HeUe's), it is said to be the table at which the Last 
Supper was eaten. 

186 28. Enid (pron. Ennid) : the patient heroine of " The Marriage 
of Geraint " and " Geraint and Enid," two idylls based upon Lady 
Charlotte Guest's translation of the old Welsh tale, " Geraint the Son 
of Erbin." Vivien : the beguiler of Merlin ; envoy from King Mark of 
Cornwall to corrupt the court of Arthur. (See " Merlin and Vivien.") 
As Guinevere represents the inner, so Vivien, Modred, and the Saxons 
represent the outer forces at work to destroy the realm. Tennyson 
found this form of her name in Ellis, Metr. Rom., I, 309, and it goes 
back to the French Prose Lancelot. 

187 32. Colewort: cabbage. 

187 40. Scorn : Cf. " The Poet," 3. 



GUINEVERE 421 

188 64. The Powers : Cf. " The Coming of Arthur," 106, and " The 
Palace of 'Art," 221 ff. 

188 87. Thine own land: Benwick. See Malory, xx, 18: "Some 
men call it Bayonne, and some men call it Beaune, wheie the wine of 
Beamie is." 

189 97, 98. Vivien . . . Modred : These words are not in the 1859 
edition. They accentuate Vivien's complicity. 

189 126. Back to his land : Lancelot dies a holy man. (" Lancelot 
and Elaine," 1418; Malory, xxi, 10.) 

190 128. Weald : open country. 

190 132. The Raven : the bird of ill omen. " Its supposed faculty 
of ' smelling death ' formerly rendered its presence, or even its voice, 
ominous to all." (Dyer, Eng. Folklore^ p. 78, quoted by littledale.) 

190 134, 135. Here, and in 11. 422-425, the poet marks the relation 
between the inward and outward forces of destruction. 

190 147. Housel: administration of the Eucharist. Cf. Maloiy, 
xxi, 12 (Launcelot dying): "So when he was houseled and eneled." 
Shrift : confession and absolution. 

191 163. Ye (1875) replaced jw/ (1859). 

191 166. The song is based upon the parable of the foolish virgins. 
Matt., xxv, 1-13. 

192 205. Cf. "Dedication" of the Idylls, 26: "That fierce light 
which beats upon a throne." 

193 220. Signs and miracles and wonders : Cf. Acts, ii, 22. 

193 234. Lyonesse : a mythical region near Cornwall, said to be 
now" lyiiig under forty fathoms of water between Land's End and the 
Scilly Isles. Tristram was bom there, and there Arthur fought his 
great battle with Modred. See " The Passing of Arthur," 81-87. 
Tennyson sometimes spelled the name with one ji and sometimes 
with two. 

193 246. Elves : Perhaps Tennyson has in mind the famous pas- 
sage at the beginning of the " Wyf of Bathes Tale." 

194 257. Thus Tennyson brings out the contrast between the joy of 
Nature "before the coming of the sinful queen" and the symbolical 
mist and gloom now settling on the land. 

194 258. Camelot : See note on " Lady of Shalott," 5. 

194 261-264. Both the Grail (as in Maloiy, xiii, 7) and the Round 
Table (as in the old French Roman de Merlin) had the property of 
providing all kinds of delicious food. See Littledale, p. 31 ; Nutt, 
Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail, pp. 75, 185. 



422 NOTES 

194 265-267. Cf. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends of the South of 
Ireland {\d>2^-i^2'j), illustration to p. J2>^ and p. 82: " On advancing 
[Mr. MacCarthy] perceived a little figure, about six inches in height, 
seated astride upon the pipe of the oldest port in the place, and bearing 
a spigot upon his shoulder." 

194 275. Malory says, simply and plainly (iii, i). Merlin warned 
Arthur that Guinevere " was not wholesome for him to take to wife." 

195 286. Gorlois : duke of Cornwall and husband of Ygeme, who, 
when Gorlois was killed, was forced to marry King Uther in shameful 
haste. The birth of Arthur was thus brought into question. (See 
Maloiy, i, 1-3; "The Coming of Arthur," 184 ff.) The name is from 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, viii, 19. 

195 288-293. Cf. " The Coming of Arthur," 363-393. 

195 289. Bude and Bos (Boscastle) : small coast-towns of Cornwall, 
which Tennyson visited in 1848 to study his local colour. [Mem., I, 274. 
Cf. I, 287, 460.) At Bude the waves are said to be larger than on any 
other part of the British coast. 

195 292. Tinta'gil : three miles west of Boscastle ; the home of 
Gorlois and of Mark. Ruins of the castle are still pointed out, but it 
does not date from British times. Cf. " The Last Tournament," 504. 
"Dundagil" (1859) is a variant form. Dark. 1859: wild. 

195 299. Cf. " The Coming of Arthur," 84 ff. 

196 328, 329. For examples, see Malory, vii, 28; x, 71. 

196 333, 334. Cf. In Mem., cxi, 15, 16. 

197 345. The doom of fire : everlasting punishment. 

198 378-397. Cf. " Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere." 

198 382. Retin'ue : so accented in The Princess, iii, 179, "Aylmer's 
Field," 842, and always in Shakespeare and Milton. 

198 385 ff. This is the scene described in " Sir Launcelot and Queen 
Guinevere." 

198 387,388. Composed in the hyacinth wood at Farringford. {Mem., 
II, 490.) 

198 395. Geoffrey says of Arthur's father (viii, 17) : " He was called 
Uther Pendragon, which in the British tongue signifies the dragon's 
head ; the occasion of this appellation being Merlin's predicting, from 
the appearance of a dragon, that he should be king." A golden dragon 
was borne as Uther's standard in his wars. Pendragon is probably a 
title, like Pharaoh, dragon in Welsh meaning " leader in war," and pe7i, 
" head " or " chief." 

198 400. Where (1875) replaced when (1859). 



GUINEVERE 423 

199 419. One: Leodogran, king of Cameliard. (Cf. "The Coming 
of Arthur," i.) 

199 423. Red ruin : This famous phrase occurs in Hazlitt, The Fight 
(1822), where one pugiUst mauUng another is said to make " a red ruin " 
of his cheek. 

199 424. Kindred : referring to Modred, who, though no real rela- 
tive of Arthur, the mysterious child of the sea, was generally considered 
such. 

199 433-435. Cf. Malory, xx, 1 1 : " God defend me, said Sir I.aunce- 
lot, that ever I should encounter with the most noble king that made 
me knight." 

200 457-480. See The Poetry of Teitnyson, p. 333 ; Gladstone, Glean- 
ings of Past Years, ii, 166. 

200 462. Cf. " Morte d' Arthur," 235, and Malory, xiv, 2, How Merlin 
likened the Round Table to the world. 

201 470. Not in edition of 1859. Cf. "The Coming of Arthur," 
132; "Lancelot and Elaine," 143. 

201 474-480. Cf. Chapman, All Fooles, i, i, 105-110. 

201 481. Before (1875) replaced tmtil (1859). 

201 485. The sin of Tristram and Isolt : See " The Last Tour- 
nament." Tristram, the most famous of the knights after Lancelot, 
guiltily loved Isolt, queen to Mark of Cornwall. 

201 500. Usk : a river in South Wales and Monmouthshire, upon 
which, at Caerleon, Arthur often held court. 

201, 202 501-504. Collins compares Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 414- 
426, and Kijig Joh7i, iii, 4, 93-97. 

202 509 ff. This is a striking instance of the way in which Tennyson 
infuses modem sentiment into mediaeval material. The spirit of Malory 
is quite different. His King Arthur is grieved but little at the sin of 
the queen, and very much at the ruin of his chivalry which that sin 
entails. He is anxious to make peace with Launcelot, but is driven 
into war by Sir Gawaine. He takes Guenever back without shame, 
and the Pope, at the head of the Church and public opinion, stamps his 
action with approval (xx, 9-14). 

202 524 ff. See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 187. 

203 535. The doom of treason ; See Malory, xviii, 4, " The custom 
was such that time that all manner of shameful death was called trea- 
son," The flaming death : burning at the stake, to which she is 
actually condemned in Malory (xviii, 4, 6; xx, 7). 

203, 204 550-577. See R. H. Hutton, Literary Studies, p. 416. 



424 NOTES 



204 569-572. In 1859: 



1 



Where I must strike against my sister's son, 

Leagued with the lords of the White Horse and knights 

Once mine, and strike him dead, etc. 

204 592. As an angel's: Cf. Acts, vi, 15. 

204 594. Cf. The Faerie Qiieefie, i, 7, st. 31 ; " Lancelot and Elame," 
432 ff. 

205 604. Littledale thinks the poet may have the Staubbach in 
mind. 

205 623. Defeat: frustration. 

208 631. Tennyson's emphasis of the power of repentance, in the 
Idylls, is commented upon in Mem., II, 131. 

206 642. Yearn'd for. 1859-1875 : w^w/f^/. Warmth and colour : 
Cf. " Lancelot and Elaine," 1 34. 

206 657. Vail : lower. Cf. Hamlet, i, 2, 70, " thy vailed lids." 



MORTE D'ARTHUR (Page 208) 

Written before October 1834. {Mem., I, 138.) W. S. Landor saw 
it in MS. in 1837, and said, " It is more Homeric than any poem of our 
time, and rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea." (Forster's 
Life of Landor, II, 323.) Published in 1842, with a framework called 
" The Epic," which playfully professes it to be the eleventh and sole- 
surviving part of a twelve-book poem, disparages its "faint Homeric 
echoes," and calls attention to its "hollow oes and aes, deep-chested 
music," and its "modem touches here and there." Though the first of 
Tennyson's Arthurian poems in blank verse, it was in time made the 
last of the Idylls of the King, being republished in 1 869 as " The Pass- 
ing of Arthur," with an introduction setting forth the events that follow 
the farewell to Guinevere : — In the fearful battle betw^een Modred and 
Arthur, all the knights are slain on either side, save th-e two leaders 
and Sir Bedivere. King and traitor meet at last ; Arthur is fatally 
wounded, but with the last stroke of Excalibur gives Modred his 
death. 

The earliest account in literature of Modred's treachery, of the battle 
in the West, and of Arthur's withdrawal to Avalon to be cured of his 
wounds is in Geoffrey of Monmouth's romantic Historia Regum Britan- 
niae (c. 1135). The story w^as amplified by the Anglo-Norman poet 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 425 

Wace in his Brut (c. 11 55), and further enlarged by the EngUsh priest 
Layamon in his Brut (c. 1200). Poems deahng with the same subject 
are the alliterative Morte Arthur (c. 1400) and the rhymed Arthur (first 
half of the fifteenth century), which have been published by the Early 
English Text Society, and the late ballad " King Arthur's Death " in 
Percy's Reliqties. 

The title and ground-work are from Malory (xxi, 5) : — " My time 
hieth fast, said the king. Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, 
take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to yonder water 
side, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that 
water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest. My lord, 
said Bedivere, your commandment shall be done, and lightly bring you 
word again. So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that 
noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of precious stones ; 
and then he said to himself : If I throw this rich sword in the water, 
thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss. And then Sir Bedi- 
vere hid Excalibur under a tree. And so, as soon as he might, he 
came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water, and had 
thrown the sword in the water. What saw thou there ? said the king. 
Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said 
of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my com- 
mandment ; as thou art to me lief atid dear, spare not, but throw it in. 
Then Sir Bedivere returned again, and took the sword in his hand; and 
then him thought sin and shame to throw away that noble sword, and 
so eft he hid the sword, and returned again, and told to the king that 
he had been at the water, and done his commandment. What saw 
thou there ? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters 
wappe and waves w^anne. Ah, traitor untrue, said King Arthur, now 
hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, thou that 
hast been to me so lief and dear } and thou art named a noble knight, 
and would betray me for the richness of the sword. But now go again 
lightly, for thy long tarrying putteth me in great jeopardy of my life, 
for I have taken cold. And but if thou do now as I bid thee, if ever I 
may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands; for thou wouldst 
for my rich sword see me dead. Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went 
to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side ; and 
there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword 
as far into the water as he might ; and there came an arm and an hand 
above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and 
brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the 



426 NOTES 

water. So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he 
saw. Alas, said the king, help me hence, for I dread me I have tarried 
over long. Then Sir Bedivere took the king upon his back, and so went 
with him to that water side. And when they were at the water side, 
even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, 
and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all 
they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. Now put me into 
the barge, said the king. And so he did softly ; and there received him 
three queens with great mourning ; and so they set them down, and in 
one of their laps King Arthur laid his head. And then that queen said : 
Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me ? alas, this wound 
on your head hath caught over-much cold. And so then they rowed 
from the land, and Sir Bedivere beheld all those ladies go from him. 
Then Sir Bedivere cried : Ah my lord Arthur, what shall become of 
me, now ye go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies ? 
Comfort thyself, said the king, and do as well as thou mayest, for in me 
is no trust for to trust in ; for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me 
of my grievous wound: and if thou hear never more of m.e, pray for my 
soul. But ever the queens and ladies wept and shrieked, that it was 
pity to hear. And as soon as Sir Bedivere had lost the sight of the 
barge, he wept and wailed, and so took the forest." 

Interesting comments on the blank verse may be found in Stedman's 
Victorian Poets., p. i6i, and in the Browning Love-Letters., I, 96. A 
full-mouthed melody is imparted by the preponderance of short Saxon 
words with long vowels. In the first twenty-five lines, out of 186 words, 
148 are monosyllables and 160 are of English origin. Emerson {History 
of the English Lattgitage, p. 126) gives the following list of percentages 
of the native element in the diction of English poets : — Shakespeare 
90 %, Tennyson 88, Spenser 86, Milton 81, Pope 80. The estimates here 
made are obtained by counting each word, whether native or foreign, as 
often as it occurs. The proportion of run-on lines is about that of King 
fohn (i in 6). Lines of especial metrical brilliancy are — 49 (Parono- 
masia); 65, 112; 70, 71 ; 1 36-141, especially 138, where the additional 
syllable expresses the rush of the sword; 179; 186-192 (note the alliter- 
ation and the vowel change from a to o). 

208 1, 2. Malory says (xxi, 3) that the battle was fought near 
Salisbury, "on a Monday after Trinity Sunday"; Geoffrey (xi, 2) 
places it in Cornwall by the river Cambula. It is generally known 
as the battle of Camlan, which is assigned by the Annates Cambriae 
(? tenth century) to a.d. 537. (See Mon. Hist. Brit., p. 830.) Tennyson, 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 427 

in accord with the sympathetic seasons of the Idylls, makes it occur on 
December 21. ("Passing of Arthur," 90.) 

208 6. Bold : Bedivere's constant epithet, from Malory, xxi, 6. He 
was the "first made of all the knights." (Cf. "Coming of Arthur," 173.) 
He is called by Geoffrey (ix, 11) "Bedver the butler," and by the 
English prose Merlin (xxxii, p. 661) " Bediuer the constable." 

208 15, 16. Cf. Malory, xx, 9 : " Now have I lost the fairest fellow- 
ship of noble knights that ever held Christian king together." 

208 16, 17. Such a sleep They sleep : Cf. Richard III, v, 3, 164. 

208 23. Cf. "Coming of Arthur," 418-423; Malory, xxi, 7. The 
belief that Arthur will return to redeem his people is said to be still 
current in Wales and Brittany. 

208 27. Excalibur : Geoffrey's " Calibum " ; in the Welsh story of 
Kulhwch and Olwen, " Caletvwlch," which indicates a derivation mean- 
ing "voracious." See Malory, i, 25; "Coming of Arthur," 294-308. In 
the Idylls it stands, according to some interpretations, for the temporal 
power of the church. ( The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 193.) 

209 31. Samite : a rich silk fabric, woven with gold or embroidered ; 
originally one having a warp twisted of six threads (from Greek e^, six, 
and /xiTos, thread). 

209 51. Levels: For the picturesque plural, like Latin "aequora 
ponti," see " Lover's Tale," iii, 4. 

209 56. Sparks. 1 842-1 853: slitds. The reason for the change is 
obvious and amusing. 

209 60. A translation of Virgil, Aeneid, iv, 285, " Animum nunc hue 
celerem, nunc dividit illuc." 

210 80. Lief: beloved. 

210 84. Added in 1853. 

211 104. Maiden of the Lake : In the allegory of the Idylls she 
may represent Religion. Cf. " Coming of Arthur," 282-293 ; " Gareth 
and Lynette," 210-219; "Lancelot and Elaine," 1394-1400. 

212 139. Streamer: Cf. Scott, The Lady of the Lake, iv, 9, 

" Shifting like flashes darted forth 
By the red streamers of the north." 

Northern morn : translation of aurora borealis. Cf. " The Talking Oak," 
275, "the northern morning," and "Last Tournament," 478-482. 

212 140. Moving isles of winter : icebergs. 

213 155. Three lives of mortal men: a "faint Homeric echo" of 
the description of Nestor (//., i, 250-252). 



428 NOTES 

213 170. As in a picture: Cf. the description of Iphigenia in 
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 241, "She smote each of her sacrificers with 
a piteous glance from her eye, appearing as in a picture." 

214 186. Dry : The use of this adjective to describe a sound is not 
noticed in the dictionaries. It is classical and seems to mean "grating, 
rasping." Cf. the use of ados by Homer (//., xii, 160), and aridus by 
Virgil {Georg., i, 357). Wordsworth speaks of " the hard dry see-saw" 
of an ass's bray. (" Peter Bell," Pt. I.) In Tennyson it is common. 
(Cf. "The Voyage," 10; " Geraint and Enid," 461; "Last Tourna- 
ment," 437.) 

214 198. Three Queens : Malory says (xxi, 6) that " one was King 
Arthur's sister, Queen Morgan le Fay ; the other was the Queen of 
Northgalis ; the third was the Queen of the Waste Lands." In the 
Idylls they are perhaps the Christian graces, Faith, Hope, and 
Charity. (Cf. "Coming of Arthur," 275-278; " Gareth and Lynette," 
225.) 

215 215. Cuisses : plate-armour for the front of the thighs. Cf. 
I Heftry IV, iv, i, 105. 

215 216, 217. Cf. " Last Tournament," 661 ; Maud, I, xxii, 57. 
215 222. Cf. Marlowe, Edward II, v, 5, 67-69 : — 

" Tell Isabel, the queen. I looked not thus. 
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont." 

215 232. Cf. Matt., ii, 2, 11 ; "Holy Grail," 452. 

215 242. Many parallels have been suggested, e.g., Hamlet, iv, 7, 
118; Coriolanus, ii, 3, 125; Greene, James IV, v, 4, 65-68; "Will 
Wateiproof," 201-205 ; but none are very close. 

216 247-255. Tennyson said, " Prayer on our part is the highest 
aspiration of the soul" {Mem., I, 324), and he told Miss Weld, "He 
can and does answer every earnest prayer, as I know from my own 
experience." {Contemporary Review, March 1893.) Cf. "Enoch Arden," 
186-188, 614-616, 797-800; "The Higher Pantheism," 11, 12; Harold, 
iii, 2, 113-115; " Akbar's Dream," 7-12. 

216 255. Cf. the sermon by J. C. Hare on The Law of Self-Sacrijice, 
preached in Trinity Chapel, Cambridge, at the annual commemoration 
on Dec. 16, 1829: — "This is the golden chain of love, whereby the 
whole creation is bound to the throne of the Creator." Tennyson 
doubtless heard this sermon. But the figure of the earth being bound 
to heaven by a golden chain is a familiar one in literature, and perhaps 



THE POET 



429 



goes back to Homer, //. viii, 19 ff. For other parallels see The Faerie 
Qiieefie, ii, 7, 46; Paradise Lost, ii, 105 1 ; Dryden's Palamon and Arcite, 
iii, 1024 f. ; and Bacon's Advancejnent of Learning, i, "According to the 
allegory of the poets . . . the highest hnk of nature's chain must needs 
be tied to the foot of Jupiter's chair." 

216 259. Avilion: the "fortunate isle" of the Celts, early identified 
with Glastonbury in Somerset, which the waters and swamps made into 
an island. The name means, by derivation, either " the place of apples " 
(Welsh aval or afal = apple), or more likely, Rhys thinks, "the place of 
Avallach," king of the dead {Arthurian Legend, ch. xiv). It is com- 
monly and rightly said that the description which follow^s comes from 
Homer {Od., iv, 566, vi, 43-45), or Lucretius (iii, 18-22), but the joys 
of a climatic paradise had been applied to Avilion long before Tenny- 
son, by an anonymous Latin writer (quoted by Rhys, p. 335), and by 
Chrestien de Troyes in Erec, 1936-1939: — 

" En cele isle n'ot I'en tonoirre, 
Ne n'i chiet foudre ne tempestc, 
Ne boz ne serpanz n'i areste ; 
N'i fait trop chaut, ne n'i iverne." 

Cf. "Palace of Art," 107; " Gareth and Lynette," 492; and Morris's 
" Ogier the Dane." 

216 262. Deep-meadow' d : Homer's ^advXeLfxos (//., ix, 151). 

216 263. From Odyssey, x, 195. Summer sea: Cf. Wordsworth, 
" Influence of Natural Objects," 63, "Till all was tranquil as a summer 
sea." 

THE POET (Page 217) 

Published in 1830. It is Tennyson's youthful interpretation of his 
mission in life. Its tone, its vague and crowded figures of speech, its 
visionary conception of Freedom and of the reforming power of the 
Poet, recall Shelley. A few years later, Tennyson would not have 
desired rites and forms to melt before his burning eyes, because he 
came to regard these things as historical necessities, to be altered or 
obliterated only when the slow process of time shows that they are 
outgrowni. Cf. " You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease," " Love thou thy 
land," In Mem., xxxiii, " Akbar's Dream," 1 19-143. 

The poem is written in iambic quatrains with interwoven rhyme, the 
first and third lines having five stresses, the second line three, and 



A20 NOTES 

i 

the fourth line two. Cf. " Palace of Art," " Dream of Fair Women," 
and "To Mary Boyle." The transposition of the stress in 11. 46, 51 is 
effective. There are three approximate rhymes: 17-19, 38-40, 53-55. 

217 3, 4. Tennyson said that he meant, when he wrote the passage, 
that the poet is moved by a hatred for the quality of Hate, a contempt 
for Scorn, etc., but he thought " the quintessence of hate," etc., a much 
finer interpretation. (See S. D. Collingwood, Lt/e of Lewis Carroll^ 
p. 71.) For the latter meaning, however, the English idiom seems 
to require the plural (cf. "A Hebrew of the Hebrews"), though the 
singular may be justified in a subjective, not a partitive, genitive phrase. 

217 7. Cf. In Mem., Prologue, 15, 16; " De Profundis," 55, 56. 

217 13. Indian reeds : blow pipes such as the South American 
Indians use for shooting arrows. 

217 15. Calpe : Gibraltar. This and Mt. Abyla, in Africa, were the 
Pillars of Hercules, the conventional limit of Europe on the west, as 
the Caucasus (the mountain range between the Black and the Caspian 
Seas) was the limit to the east. 

218 19. The field flower: the dandelion. Cf. "Aylmer's Field," 
93; " Gareth and Lynette," 1002. 

218 34. One in 1842 replaced a (1830). 

219 45-47. In 1830: — • 

And in the bordure of her robe was writ 

Wisdom, a name to shake 
Hoar anarchies, as with a thiinderfit. 

This peculiarly infelicitous word " thundei-fit " is in " The Ancient 
Mariner," 69, and in Shelley's " Lines written among the Euganean 
Hills," 182. 

219 54. Whirl'd in 1842 took the place of hurled. One does not 
" hurl " a sword. 

THE POET'S SONG (Page 219) 

Published in 1842. The Poet has the charm of Orj^heus when he 
sings of the immortal future. 

The metre is anapaestic, though many of the bars are iambic. Each 
stanza is composed of two quatrains with alternate rhyme. In the first 
stanza all the lines have four stresses, except the last, which has three ; 
in the second stanza lines of three stresses regularly alternate with those 
of four. 



THE PALACE OF ART 431 

219 8. Cf. James Hogg (The Ettrick Shepherd), The Queen's Wake, 
"Old David" (1813): — 

" The larks, that rose the dawn to greet, 
Drop Ufeless at the singer's feet." 

219 9. Fly replaced bee in 1889. 



TO 



with the following poem 

(Page 220) 

It is not known to whom this blank-verse dedication was addressed ; 
perhaps it was Trench ; more likely it was an imaginary person. 
220 10-13. Cf, Cowper, " Expostulation," 634 : — 

" Wisdom and Goodness are twin born, one heart 
Must hold both sisters, never seen apart." 

220 16. Howling in outer darkness: Cf. Matt., viii, 12. 
220 17. Common clay, etc. : See Genesis, ii, 7. 



THE PALACE OF ART (Page 221) 

Composed in its first form as early as April 10, 1832. {Mem., I, 85.) 
The poet notes, " Trench said to me, when we were at Trinity together, 
' Tennyson, we cannot live in art.' ' The Palace of Art ' is the embodi- 
ment of my own belief that the Godlike life is wdth man and for man." 
{Mem., I, 118, 505.) The poem has been greatly altered since its pub- 
lication in 1833. The various readings and the meaning of the poem 
are discussed quite fully in The Poetry of Tennyson, pp. 21-46. The 
allegory should be compared with George Herbert's " The World," 
the lesson with the Book of Ecclesiastes, ii, i-ii, and R. C. Trench's 
" The Prize of Song." 

The metre is the same as that of Henry Vaughan's " They are all 
gone into the world of light ! " and is another variation on the elegiac 
quatrain. (See introduction to " A Dream of Fair Women," p. 352.) 
The result of shortening the second line to four stresses and the fourth 
line to three stresses is to throw more enforcement upon the rhyming 
words of these lines than upon the rhyming words of the first and third, 



432 NOTES 

by bringing them closer together. The additional weight upon the 
final word of the stanza gives it unity and compactness. (Corson, 
Primer of English Verse, p. 80.) The sense overflows from one stanza 
to another in twelve instances. There are eighteen approximate rhymes, 
two assonant rhymes (1-3, 86-88), and one echo-rhyme (61-63). Hair 
— her (98-100) can be described only as a defective echo-rhyme. 
221 1-4. Cf. Luke, xii, 18, 19. 

221 15, 16. Satuni casts its shadow on the broad belt of luminous 
matter by which it is encircled, and the shadow appears motionless, 
though the planet rotates on its axis in the short period of about ten 
hours. 

222 30. Verge : horizon ; as in " Tears, idle tears," 9. 

223 58-60. These lines give a good definition of a work of Art : 
a perfect whole (unity), from living nature (verity), fitted to express a 
mood of the soul (significance). 

223 61. Arras: a tapestiy fabric woven with coloured figures, named 
from the French town where it was first made. 

224 80. Hoary to the wind : The gray underside of the olive leaves 
is shown as the orchards are ruffled by the wind. 

224 81. Slags : volcanic scoria. 

224 85-88. This stanza is a landscape in the manner of Constable. 
Softer than sleep is Theocritus's v-kvw fxaXaKurepa (v, 51) and Virgil's 
"somno mollior " {£c/., vii, 45), already translated by Shelley in " Rosa- 
lind and Helen " (Globe Edition, p. 229) and in " Arethusa," 15. 

224 93. We come now to legendary art. 

224 99. St. Cecily : patron saint of music, and inventor of the 
organ (third century). The Goldeji Legend says that an angel watched 
her night and day, and crowned her purity with celestial roses. See 
Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, II, 571. Cf. Dryden, "A 
Song for St. Cecilia's Day," 52-54: — 

" When to her organ vocal breath was given, 
An angel heard, and straight appeared 
Mistaking earth for heaven." 

225 102. Houris : nymphs who, according to the Moslem faith, are 
to be the companions of the true believers in Paradise. 

225 105. Uther's deeply-wounded son : King Arthur. 
225 107. Avalon : See on " Morte d'Arthur," 259. 
225 111. The Ausonian king: Numa Pompilius, who met the 
nymph Egeria in a grove near Rome, and was instructed by her in 



THE PALACE OF ART 433 

regard to forms of worship. See Livy, i, 19, 21 ; Byron, Childe Harold^ 
iv, St. cxv-cxix ; The Princess, ii, 64. Ausonia is a poetic name for 
southern and central Italy. 

225 113. Engrail'd : a term in heraldry, meaning "indented in 
curved lines." 

225 115. Cama, or Camdeo : the Cupid of Brahmin mythology, 
portrayed as riding on a lory (parrot). His throne is mentioned in 
Sir William Jones's " Hymn to Camdeo." Cf. " Love," in Poems by 
Two Brothers. 

225 117. Europa : princess of Phoenicia, whom Zeus, in the form of 
a bull, carried off to Crete. The picture is from Moschus, ii, 125-130. 

225 121. Ganymede : a lovely Trojan boy, whom Zeus, in the form 
of an eagle, carried up to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods. 
This stanza is taken as a symbol of Tennyson's art in the picture by 
Walker in the Library of Congress at Washington. 

225 126. Caucasian: Indo-European. Blumenbach (c. 1800) said 
that the ' white ' race came from the region of the Caucasus. 

226 131. We come now to portraiture and historical art. 

226 133. Like a seraph : Cf. Gray, of Milton, " Progress of Poesy," 

95, 96: — 

" Nor second He, that rode sublime 

Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy." 

226 134. Cf. " Sonnet to W. C. Macready," " Shakespeare's bknd 
and universal eye." 

226 135. Grasp'd his song : In the famous portrait of Dante by 
Giotto, the poet is represented as holding a book. 

226 137. The Ionian father : Homer. 

226 143. Cf. Genesis, xxviii, 12. 

226, 227 145-157. Observe that while the portraits of the wise and 
great are hung on the walls or blazoned in the windows, the stoiy of 
the people is told in mosaic on the floor, and trodden under foot. The 
" beast of burden " may be intei-preted as slavery ; the " tiger," rebel- 
lion ; the " athlete," democracy ; the " sick man," anarchy which is ripe 
for despotism. 

227 161. Oriels' coloured flame : This and many other details of the 
lordly pleasure-house may have been suggested by Bacon's description 
of a "perfect palace" in his essay " Of Building." 

227 164. The first of those who know : describes both Plato and 
Bacon. Dante {Inf., iv, 131) applies the phrase to Aristotle, " il 
maestro di color che sanno." 



434 NOTES 

227 171. Memnon : a colossal statue near Thebes (attributed to 
Memnon, son of Aurora, but really of Amenophis III), which was 
said to emit music at sunrise. Cf. The Princess, iii, lOO, and "A 
Fragment." 

228 183. Night divine: Cf. Homer's Kvi(f)a$ iepov. (//., xi, 194.) 
228 186. Anadems : garlands (Greek dvadrjina). 

228 203, 204. See Lztke, viii, ;^2. 

229 213. Riddle of the painful earth: Cf. "Two Voices," 170; 
"Miller's Daughter," 19, 20. 

229 219, 220. See Acts, xii, 21-23. 

229 223. Cf. Arthur Hallam, TheodiccEa Novissima {Remains^ 
p. 359) : — " [Redemption] indeed is in the power of God's election, 
with whom alone rest the abysmal secrets of personality " ; Richter's 
"abysmal Ich " ; and Hebrews, iv, 13. 

229 227. Wrote, 'Mene, mene,' etc. : Cf. Daniel, v, 25. 

230 241. Cf. Beckford, Vathek : " Soliman raised his hands towards 
Heaven, in token of supplication, and the Caliph discerned through 
his bosom, which was transparent as crystal, his heart enveloped in 
flames." 

230 242. Fretted: worm-eaten. Cf. "A Dirge," 10; "Supposed 
Confessions," 1S5. 

230 255. Circumstance : " old phrase for the surrounding sphere of 
the heavens." (Palgrave.) 

231 275. Dully : almost unique use as an adjective. 

231 281-283. Cf. Wisdom of Solomon, xvii, 19 ff. 

232 295. The conclusion points to the hope of a nobler art devoted 
to the service of humanity. 

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM (Page 232) 

Written in August 1889, and published in the Dcmeter volume of 
the same year. Tennyson said, " In the story of ' Merlin and Nimue ' 
I have read that Nimue means the Gleam — which signifies in my 
poem the higher poetic imagination." [Mem., II, 366.) It is, indeed, 
a sort of poetical biography, and the reader will have little difficulty in 
discovering the allusions in each strophe. (See Mem., I, xii-xv; The 
Poetry of Tennyson, p. 337.) Cf. " The Voyage," 57-72 ; " Freedom," 
13; " Ulysses," 31. 

The metre is an unrhymed irregular verse of two stresses, arranged 
in strophes of from ten to twenty-five lines. It gives somewhat the 



'FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE' 435 

same effect as the Old and Middle English alliterative poetry, but the 
alliteration, which is freely used, does not conform to the early rules. 
" The Battle of Brunanburh " is a closer imitation. 

232 14. Learn'd : taught ; formerly in good usage, but now obsolete. 
Cf. Richard II, iv, i, 120. 

232 15. The Master : Bleys is Merlin's teacher in Arthurian story 
(" Coming of Arthur," 154), but a greater Master is meant here. 

234 54. After this, in 1889, an extra line, " Horses and oxen," which 
was not very poetic. 

234 66. Arthur the king : The composition of an Arthurian epic 
was contemplated before the death of Hallam. Consequently the Idylls 
are alluded to before /;/ Alemoriajfi, though published later. 

234 70. Bicker'd : See on " The Song of the Brook," 4. 

235 86, 87. The valley Named of the shadow : Psalm xxiii, 4. 

236 111. Can: used absolutely, as in Hamlet, v, 3, 331, "I can no 
more." 

236 120-122. Cf. Wordsworth, " Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a 
Picture of Peele Castle " : — 

" The light that never was, on sea or land. 
The consecration, and the Poet's dream." 



'FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE' (Page 237) 

Written during a visit to Italy in the summer of 1880 {Afejti., II, 
247) ; contributed to The Nineteenth Century, March 1883, and reprinted 
in Tiresias, etc. (1885). Tennyson has expressed his admiration for 
Catullus (B.C. 87-54) in Mem., I, 266, II, 239, and " Poets and their 
Bibliographies," 8, and has imitated his metres in " Boadicea " and 
" Hendecasyllabics." 

The metre is eight-stress trochaic, all the lines rhyming together. 

237 1. Desenzano : a small town at the south-western angle of the 
Lago di Garda. A httle to the east projects the narrow neck of Sir- 
mione (Latin Sirmio) now planted with olives, at the end of which was 
Catullus's villa. 

237 2. *0 venusta Sirmio': quoted from Catullus, xxxi, 12. 
Venusta : lovely. 

237 5. * Ave atque Vale ' : Hail and farewell ! — the formula of 
address to the dead. Quoted from ci, where Catullus takes everlasting 
leave of his brother. 



436 ' NOTES 

237 8. Lydian laughter: Cf. xxxi, 13: "O Lydiae lacus undae, 
Ridete." The Etruscans, who were believed to be of Lydian origin, 
settled near Lake Benacus (Garda). 

237 9. All-but-island : Cf. xxxi, i : " Paene insularum, Sirmio," etc. 



TO VIRGIL (Page 237) 

Contributed to The Nitieteeiith Century, September 1882, and repub- 
lished with Tiresias in 1885. The nineteenth centenary of Virgil's death 
fell on Sept. 21, 1882. Tennyson was attracted to the subject, for he 
resembles the Latin poet so closely in the careful perfection of his style 
that he has been often called " England's Virgil." His estimate, therefore, 
is sympathetic, valuable, and erring, if at all, on the side of enthusiasm. 

The poem shows Tennyson's mature manner at its best ; compact, 
yet clear, and full of phrases which are at once significant and musical 
(e.g., 11. 4, 6, 10). It is written in rhymed trochaic couplets, with nine 
stresses to the line, and the light syllable of the last bar omitted (" cata- 
lectic "). But in reading, it falls naturally into quatrains of alternating 
four- and five-stress lines, with alternate rhyme. 

237 1, 2. Refer to the chief incidents of the Aeneid. 

237 3. He that sang the Works and Days : Hesiod. 

238 5. Wheat and tilth refer to the first book of the Georgics, 
woodland and vineyard to the second, horse and herd to the third, 
and hive to the fourth. 

238 6. Lonely word : Tennyson quoted as an example " cunctan- 
tem" in Aen., vi, 211. {Me??i., II, 385.) 

238 7. Refers to Eclogue i (i, 2). 

238 8. Refers to Eclogue vi (13-26). 

238 9, 10. Refers to Eclogue iv (especially 5-9, 24, 28-29, 38), called 
the " Pollio " after C. Asinius Pgllio, a patron of Virgil. 

238 11. Cf. Aen., vi, 726, 727 : — 

'' totamque infusa per artus 
Mens agitat molem at magno se corpore miscet." 

238 12. Cf. Aen., i, 462 : " Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia 
tangunt." 

238 14. Golden branch amid the shadows : Cf. Aen., vi, 208. 

239 18. Cf. Eel. i, 67 : " Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." 
239 19. Mantovano : Virgil was born at Andes in the Mantuan 

country. Note the complimentary use of the Italian adjective. 



MILTON 437 

MILTON 
Alcaics (Page 239) 

Written in the summer of 1863 {Mem., I, 493), published in the 
Cornhill in December, as one of several "Attempts at classical Metres 
in Quantity," and included in Enoch Arden, etc. (1864). Tennyson 
here lays his laurel at the feet of the great English master of the grand 
style, as Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, and Landor had done before him. 
His admiration for Milton was intense ; he thought him superior to 
Virgil as a stylist, and said that there was nothing in Enghsh to equal 
the splendour of his finest passages. These lines present the contrast 
between the sublime description of the angelic combat in the sixth book 
of Paradise Lost, and the beautiful description of Eden in the fourth 
book (11. 131-165, 214-268). See The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 53. 

The metre, Tennyson said, was intended to imitate, not the Horatian, 
but the Greek Alcaics, which had a much freer and lighter movement. 
{Mem., W, II.) The diagram of the Alcaic Strophe is:' — 



: / 


\j 


U >ll 


-C w 


u wl 


/ 


A 


: j_ 


\j 


1^ >ll 


-0 w 


1-^ w 1 


/ 


A 


: j_ 


\y 


1^ >l- 


— ^ 1 


J^ w 






/ 


\y 


1 '' 1 


-A w 


1 — ^ 







Tennyson has conformed to this, both as regards accent and quantity, 
as far as the latter is possible in English. Thus the second syllable of 
" inventor " is long according to classical prosody, and is so used by 
Tennyson, but the e is short in pronunciation ; and compare the varying 
quantity of "as" in 11. 7 and 12. 

239 3. Organ-voice : De Quincey likens Milton's eloquence to the 
movement of an organ voluntary, in his essay on Conversation. 



"OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS" (Page 240) 

Written in 1S33, and published, with two other poems of a similar 
character, in 1842. It was probably suggested by some popular dem- 
onstrations in connection with the rejection of the Reform Bill of 1832 
by the House of Lords. {Mem., I, 506.) The first two stanzas are an 
apotheosis of Freedom as an ideal so lofty that in the ancient world it 
was realized only in the most fragmentary way. (Cf. " Freedom," 1884.) 



438 NOTES 

The last four stanzas refer to the history of Freedom m " her regal seat 
of England" {In Mem., cix, 14), where the ideal has been gradually 
approached in the course of a thousand years. The poem is an avowal 
of that sane and moderate liberalism which was Tennyson's political 
creed. 

It is written in iambic quatrains with interwoven rhyme ; the first 
three lines have four bars, the last line is shortened to three. 

240 5. There in was substituted in 1851 for Within. 

240 15. The triple forks : not the trident of Neptune, but the 
thunderbolts of Jove ; Latin " trisulcum fulmen " (Seneca, Hippol., 189) 
or "trisulci ignes " (Ovid, Met., ii, 848). 



ENGLAND AND AMERICA IN 1782 (Page 241) 

Written before Nov. 10, 1871 {Mem., II, no); published in The 
New York Ledger, Jan. 6, 1872, with a note from the author stating 
that the poem " is supposed to be written or spoken by a liberal English- 
man at the time of our recognition of American Independence." The 
price paid was a thousand pounds, which is probably the largest sum 
ever given for twenty lines of poetiy. Reprinted in the Cabinet Edition, 
1874. The poem is sufficient to answer the false reports that Tennyson 
was prejudiced against America. Cf. " Opening of the Indian and Colo- 
nial Exhibition," st. iii, " Hands all Round " (original version), st. iv and v. 

The common-metre quatrain is here modified by the insertion of an 
additional line after the third to rhyme with it. 

241 19. Hampden (i 594-1643): one of the Parliamentary leaders 
at the beginning of the Civil War. His refusal to pay the "ship- 
money" in 1636 W'as upon precisely the same principle that animated 
the American revolutionists, viz., that taxation without representation 
is tyranny. 

TO THE QUEEN (Page 242) 

This dedication of the collected poems was Tennyson's first utter- 
ance as Laureate, and was included in the edition of 1851. Two manu- 
script copies are in existence, containing many stanzas suppressed in 
print. (See Luce, p. 68 ; Mem., I, v ; Jones, Growth of the Idylls, 
p. 152.) The poem reveals Tennyson's deep personal reverence for 
the noble-hearted Lady who honoured him with the Laureateship and 
her own friendship. (See their correspondence in Mem., II, 433-457-) 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 439 

The metre is that of In Memoriam ; which see. 

242 1. In 1851 : Revered Victoria, you that hold. 

242 5. In 185 1 : I thank you that your Royal grace. 

242 8. Him : Wordsworth, w^hom Tennyson succeeded as Poet 
Laureate on Nov. 19, 1850. Tennyson said, " He was a representative 
Poet Laureate, such a poet as kings should honour, and such an one as 
would do honour to kings ; — making the period of a reign famous by the 
utterance of memorable words concerning that period." (i^^w., 1, 338.) 

242 13-16. Added in 1853. 

242 20. Kindness. In 1851 : sweetness. 

242 24. After this, in 185 1, the following stanza, referring to the 
first Crystal Palace Exhibition (opened on May i) : — 

She brought a vast design to pass, 
When Europe and the scatter'd ends 
Of our fierce world were mixt as friends 

And brethren in her halls of glass ; 

243 32. Wider. In 1851 : broader. The line probably refers to the 
extension of the franchise. 

243 35. Cf. Shelley, " Ode to Liberty," st. v : — 

" Athens ... on the will 
Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set." 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON 
(Page 243) 

This is the most important of the poems in which Tennyson speaks 
as Poet Laureate, and probably the noblest poem ever produced in 
connection with that office. It was written in the " Green Room " at 
Chapel House, Twickenham, and published, as a pamphlet of sixteen 
pages, on the day of the Duke's funeral, Nov. 18, 1852. As his death 
had occurred on September 14, the remarks made by several critics on 
the hasty w^riting of the Ode are misleading. A new edition, with 
many emendations, was published in 1853, and the poem was again 
revised before it was included in the Matid volume of 1855. It was 
a favourite with Tennyson for reading aloud, and his interpretation 
brought out the richness and beauty of its rhymes and its varied and 
majestic metrification. I heard him read it in August 1892, and have 
preserved some of my impressions in these notes. In the first two 



440 NOTES 

strophes the movement begins with a solemn prelude and the confused 
sound of a mighty throng assembling. The third strophe is the Dead 
March, with its long, slow, monotonous, throbbing time, expressed by a 
single rhyme recurring at the end of each line. The fourth strophe is 
an interlude ; the poet, watching the procession, remembers the great 
Duke as he used to walk through the London streets, and recalls the 
simplicity and strength of his appearance and character. In the fifth 
strophe the music is controlled by the repeated tolling of the great bell 
qf St. Paul's Cathedral, and then by the volleying guns, as the body is 
carried into the church. The strophe closes with a broad, open move- 
ment which prepares the way, like an " avenue of song," for the anthem 
of strophes vi, vii, and viii. It begins wnth a solo of three lines, in a 
different measure, representing Nelson waking in his tomb and asking 
who it is that comes to rest beside him. The answer follows with the 
full music of organ and choir, celebrating first the glory of Wellington's 
achievements as warrior, the value of his counsel and his conduct as 
statesman, and then the unselfish integrity of his character as a man, 
closing with a burst of harmony in which the repetition of the word 
"honour" produces the effect of a splendid fugue. A great silence 
follows, and the ninth strophe begins with a single quiet voice (Tenny- 
son said, " Here I thought I heard a sweet voice, like the voice of a 
woman ") singing of peace and love and immortality. The movement 
is at first tender and sorrowful, then aspiring and hopeful, then solemn 
and sad as the dust falls on the coffin, and at last calm and trustful in 
the victory of faith. 

Cf. Rossetti's fine poem, " Wellington's Funeral." 

243 1. 1852, 1853: Let us bury, etc. 

243 5, 6. 1852: — 

When laurel-garlanded leaders fall. 
And warriors, etc. 

British generals acted as pall-bearers. 

243 9. In 1852, not present; in 1853, two lines: — 

He died on Walmer's lonely shore, 
But here, etc. 

Walmer is on the coast, a little north-east of Dover. 

244 20. 1852 : Our so?'row draws but on the goldeti Past. 

244 21, 22. Added in 1853. Tennyson said: " It was a dark morn- 
ing, and I was walking across the park with a friend. A tall man on 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 441 

horseback passed us and gave us a military salute. With my short- 
sighted eyes I could not tell who it was, and, when I asked my friend, 
he said, ' That is the Duke of Wellington.' It was the only time I ever 
saw him." 

244 26. Whole in himself : Cf . Horace, Sat. ii, 7, 78, " in se ipso 
totus." 

244 27. Amplest replaced in 1853 largest. 

244 28. Clearest of replaced in i?>^^ freest from. 

244 35. Cf. Claudian, De Bel. Goth., 459, " Stilichonis apex et cog- 
nita fulsit Canities." This was quoted by Disraeli Nov. 15, 1852, in his 
speech moving a vote of thanks to the Queen, who had decreed a pub- 
lic funeral for the Duke. The speech became notorious through a 
charge of plagiarism. (See American Joicrnal of Philology, XXIII, 

244 38. That tower of strength : " His name was a tower of 
strength abroad," wrote Lord Palmerston to his brother, Sept. 17, 1852. 
(E. Ashley, Palmerston, II, 250.) 

244 39. Four-square : Cf. Princess, v, 222. It is the Greek 
Terpdycovos, as used by Simonides (5th frag.) and Aristotle {Rhet., 
iii, II, 2). 

244 42. World-victor : Napoleon, who had aimed at the conquest 
of the world. 

245 49-52. Wellington is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathe- 
dral, which is surmounted by a golden cross. Here lie also Admiral 
Horatio Nelson (the " mighty seaman " of 1. 83), Lord Collingwood, 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, J. M. W. Turner, etc. 

245 50. To show the minute care which Tennyson gave to details, 
he was questioning in 1892 whether "upon" would not be better than 
" over" in this line. 

245 56. Its. 1852-1855: his. The bier was covered with "a 
black velvet pall adorned with escocheons " and borne upon " a funeral 
car drawn by twelve horses decorated with trophies and heraldic 
atchievements." {Programme of the Duke of Wellington's Funeral : 
pubUshed by F. Reynolds, i Savoy Street, Strand.) The names of 
Wellington's victories were inscribed in gold letters on the car. 

245 59. A deeper knell, etc. Added in 1853. ^«^ was inserted in 
1855. 

245 64. Many a clime : Holland, India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, 
France, Belgium. 

246 79. Ever-echoing. 1852- 185 5: ever-ringing. 



442 NOTES 

246 80. This address of Nelson, says Mr. Frederic Harrison, is 
"one of the grandest conceptions in modem poetry." {Tenttyson, 
Ruskin, Mill, p. 32.) 

246, 247 91-113. In 1852 the reading is : — 

His martial wisdom kept us free; 
O warrior-seaman, this is he, 
This is England's greatest son, 
Worthy of our gorgeous rites. 
And worthy to be laid by thee; 
He that gain'd a hundred fights, 
And never lost an Enghsh gun; 
He that in his earlier day 
Against the myriads of Assaye 
Clash'd with his fiery few and won: 
And underneath another sun 
Made the soldier, led him on. 
And ever great and greater grew. 
Beating from the wasted vines 
All their marshals' bandit swarms 
Back to France with countless blows ; 
Till their host of eagles flew 
Past the Pyrenean pines, etc. 

The revision of 1853 adopted the present reading, except 1. loi a nearer 
for another ; and 1. 113 Past (retained in 1855) for Beyond. 

246 97. Cf. Disraeli's speech, mentioned above on 1. 35 : " During 
that period that can be said of him which can be said of no other 
captain — that he captured 3,000 cannon from the enemy, and never 
lost a single gun:' (Stocqueler's Life of Wellington, II, 360.) 

246 99. Assaye (or Assye) : a city in the extreme north of British 
India, where the Duke of Wellington, then General Wellesley, defeated 
40,000 Mahrattas with 5,000 Englishmen, Sept. 23, 1803. 

246 101. In 1809-1810 Wellington constructed the lines of Torres 
Vedras fortifying an area of 500 square miles around Lisbon. In 181 3 
he drove the French out of the Peninsula and invaded their own 
country. 

247 118. This line was followed in 1852-1853 hy — He withdrew to 

brief repose. 

247 121. Barking: Tennyson said, "Did you ever hear an eagle 
bark ? " The word exactly describes the sound the bird makes when 
angry. 



ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON 443 

247 122. Duty's iron crown : an allusion to the Iron Crown of 
Lombardy, which was said to be made from a nail of the Cross, and 
was regarded as the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. 

247 123. That loud sabbath: Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 
June 18, 1S15. 

247 129. A sudden jubilant ray: Cf. Creasy's Fifteen Decisive 
Battles, ch. xv, "As [the British and German regiments] joyously sprang 
for^vard against the discomfited masses of the French, the setting sun 
broke through the clouds which had obscured the sky during the 
greater part of the day, and glittered on the bayonets of the alUes." 

247 133. World-earthquake. Before 1875: world's earth(]icake. 

248 146. Cf. "The Dying Swan," 31-35. 

248 151. Cf. The Princess, "Conclusion," 51-57. 

248 154, 155. Added in 1853, except that in 1853 and 1855 Saxon 
stood for Briton. 

248 157. 1852: 0/ JHOst icnbounded reverence and regret. 
1853 : Of bozindless reverence and regret. 

248 159. Added in 1853. 

248 160, 161. The eye ... Of Europe : a classical expression, as 
Justin (v, 8, 4) of Athens and Sparta, " ex duobus Graeciae oculis." 
Cf. Paradise Regained, iv, 240. 

248 166. Help to. Added in 1853. 

248 168. 1852: And kelp the inarch of human mind. 

248 169. At length. Added in 1855. 

249 170. In 1852 these lines followed: — 

Perchance our greatness will increase; 
Perchance a darkening future yields 
Some reverse from worse to worse, 
The blood of men in quiet fields, 
And sprinkled on the sheaves of peace. 

249 171. 1852: And O remember, etc. 

249 172. 1852: Respect his sacred warning ; guard your coasts : 

1853 : Revere his warning ; gtcard your coasts : 

For a full account of Wellington's insistence, in 1844-1845, upon the 

repair of the coast defences, and the increase of the naval and military 

establishments, see C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel, III, 197-219, 396-412. 

249 173. Added in 1853. 

249 181, 182. Added in 1855. 

249 183, 184. Added in 1853. 



444 NOTES 

249 185. Added in 1S55. 

249 186. Whose replaced in 1853 His. 

249 188. Truth-teller . . . Alfred: Cf. Asser, De Rebus Gestis 
ALlfredi (in Mon. Hist. Brit., p. 471 c), "quod a domino meo Alfredo 
Angulsaxonum rege veridico, etiam seepe mihi referente audivi." So 
also, where his death is recorded in the Annals of St. Neot (miscalled 
Annals of Asser) under the year 900, "iElfredus veridicus," etc. {Mon. 
Hist. Brit., p. 498). 

249 194. Military representatives of all the great powers of Europe, 
with the exception of Austria, were there to do him honour. 

249 196. All her stars : Besides being successively baron, viscount, 
earl, marquis, and duke, WelUngton was a knight of twenty-six orders 
and a marshal of eight nations. 

250 21.5. Crags of Duty : Cf. Simonides (fragment 41, ed. Hiller) : — 

ecrrt tls \6yos 
Tap Aperav vaieip 5u<TefjL^dT0is i-rrl Trerpais. 

And see also the motto to Scott's Woodstock, ch. iv. 
250 217. Cf. Rev., xxi, 23. 

250 218-226. 1852: — 

He has not fail'd : he hath prevail'd: 

So let the men whose hearths he saved from shame 

Thro' many and many an age proclaim, etc. 

251 241. Added in 1853. 
251 251-255. 1852: — 

For solemn, too, this day are we. 

O friends, we doubt not that for one so true, etc. 

The edition of 1853 has the present reading, except 1. 2^4: Lifted up 
in heart are we. 

251 259-261. Added in 1853. Cf. In Mem., cxxiii. 
251262. World on world. 1852-1855: worlds on worlds. 

252 266-270. Added in 1853, which edition has the present reading 
except sounds for tuails in 1. 267. The Dead March is from Handel's 
Saul. 

252 271. He. 1852: The man. 
252 278. 1852-1855: But speak, etc. 



THE VISION OF SIN 445 



THE VISION OF SIN (Page 253) 

Published in 1842. It is an allegory of sensual pleasure, slowly 
deadened by satiety, and changing into cruel cynicism, black-hearted 
malice, insane scorn. When the soul is brought to that Death which 
is the wages of Sin, the poet leaves the question of ultimate hope 
enveloped in mystery. Cf. hi Mem., liv, " Wages." 

Almost as noteworthy as the moral significance of the poem is 
its versification. Parts I and V are in the heroic couplet. Part III 
is also in five-stress iambic, but the rhyme-order is varied. Part II 
opens with the quicker trochaic measure, momentarily retarded in 
11. 26-28 by a return to iambic, only to plunge forward (1. 29) into 
wild dance-music. Cf. Shelley's "Triumph of Life," 138-150. The 
end of this " nerve-dissolving melody " is marked by a long iambic 
line (43). The " death-song of the Ghoul," in Part IV, is in four- 
stress trochaic quatrains, with final truncation and interwoven rhyme, 
like the last rollicking tune of " The Jolly Beggars." This grotesque 
framework intensifies its bitterness. There are ten approximate 
rhymes. 

253 3. A horse with wings : the aspiring soul. Cf. Plato, Phaedrns, 
246, A-E. 

256 9]. Cf. Gal., ii, 16. 

256 97,98. Moment. 1842-1850: miniUe, — which perhaps seemed 
too mathematically precise. 

257 128. A replaced the (the reading of 1842 and 1843). 

258 141, 142. The hue Of that cap : referring to the blood-red 
Liberty-cap of the French revolutionists. 

259 187. God's likeness : Cf. Ge?iesis, i, 26. 

259 190. Cf. Genesis, ii, 25. 

260 208. Once more uprose. \^^2-\^^6: Again arose. 

260 211. Shards: fragments of any hard material, especially of 
pottery. Cf. Hamlet, v, i, 254. 

260 213. Spake replaced said (the reading of 1842). 

260 214. After this line in the Selection of 1865 was the following 
couplet (not retained in the collected editions) : — 

" Another answer'd ' But a crime of sense ? " 
" Give him new nerves with old experience." 

260 224. When Professor Tyndall asked Tennyson for some expla- 
nation of this fine, he replied merely ' that the power of explaining such 



446 NOTES 

concentrated expressions of the imagination was very different from that 
of writing them.' {Mem., II, 475.) But from Mem., I, 322, it would seem 
that the poet meant to imply that there was hope even for the man 
who ' bettered not with time.' 



THE ANCIENT SAGE (Page 261) 

First published with Tiresias in 1885. It was written after reading 
Speculations on Metaphysics, etc., of '■The Old Philosopher,^ Lao-Tsze, 
by the Rev. John Chalmers (1868). See Mem., II, 476. Lao-Tsze 
was a contemporary of Confucius in the sixth century B.C., and the 
founder of Taoism. It is said that after he had been for many years 
curator of the Royal Library, the decay of the dynasty impelled him to 
leave the capital of Chau, Lo-Yang, and he went away to the barrier- 
gate leading out of the Ijingdom to the north-east. There, at the request 
of the warden, Yin-Hsi, he stopped and wrote the Tdo Teh King, which 
sets forth his vague philosophy, and then passed out of the gate forever. 
{Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxix, p. 35.) This story has evidently 
been adapted by Tennyson, though the philosophy of the "Ancient 
Sage" is generally far from being that of Lao-Tsze. 

The poem is indeed intensely personal, especially the passages about 
Faith (69-77) and the Passion of the Past (216-228). (See Mem., II, 
319.) Tennyson said to his niece Miss Weld, "It is just what I should 
have beUeved if I had lived ' a thousand summers ere the time of Christ,' 
but to get at my present belief you must add on Christianity." {Glimpses 
of Tennyson, p. 117.) His is one of the "two voices" of the poem, the 
other is a young poet's, who shares the creed of Omar Khayyan*. The 
Sage takes the Kantian position that God and immortaUty are objects, 
not of Proof, but of Faith. This faith is with him dependent partly 
upon the voice of conscience, partly upon the memories of pre-existence, 
partly upon an ecstatic union with the divine. Knowledge is every way 
limited. Time, the sole grim deity of the materialist, is merely an 
illusion, a conditioning form of our superficial knowledge. The appar- 
ent miseries and imperfections of the world are due to imperfections 
of our human nature. The best cure for unbelief is in good works and 
practical morality. 

The metrical contrast of lyrical and blank verse is suggestive of the 
yearning sadness and forced levity of agnosticism as set over against 
the calm assurance of faith. (See Luce, p. 391.) The song is in iambic 
verse, alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, with interwoven 



THE ANCIENT SAGE 



447 



rhyme. The blank verse has eight feminine endings, and some thirty- 
five run-on Unes. Note the rhetorical balance in the two passages, 
57-65, 70-77. 

262 31. The Nameless: "These misuses of the word 'God' [by 
the Calvinist and the anthropomorphist] make me prefer another name. 
I prefer to say the Highest or the Supreme Being." (Tennyson to 
Wilfrid Ward, The New Review, XV, 89.) Cf. Tdo Teh King, i, i, " The 
name which can be named is not the eternal name." 

262 34. The Sage thinks of man's inner nature, w^hile the young 
materialist recognizes only sensation. " God is unknowable as he is in 
Himself," said Tennyson to Wilfrid Ward, " but he touches us at one 
point. That point is the conscience. If the conscience could be further 
developed, we might in some sense see God." 

262 39 £f. Cf. Tdo Teh King, xiv, i, xxi, xxxiv, i, 2. 

262 42. See Mem., I, 319 (footnote), and the article by Ward above 
referred to, p, 87. Tennyson disliked the atomic theory, and held that 
the infinite divisibility of matter (as illustrated by a grain of sand) made 
materialism unthinkable. Cf. " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 
210-212. 

262 50-52. Cf. Tao Teh King, xxxix, i, 2. See also Mem., I, 319, 
and Miss Weld's Glimpses of Tennyson, p. 119, where Tennyson states 
this idea in prose. 

263 76. Cf. "Aylmer's Field," 102: — 

The music of the moon 
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale. 

263 82-90. Cf. "Passing of Arthur," 13-17. Tennyson inclined 
somewhat to the theory of a Demiurge as ' the nearest explanation of 
the facts of the world which we can get.' (Knowles in Nineteenth 
Century, January 1893. 

264 103, 104. Cf. "The Mystic," 5, 6, 17-24; "The 'How' and the 
'Why,'" 5-7; The Princess, iii, 307-313. "To God all is present," 
said Tennyson. " He sees present, past, and future as one." {Mem., I, 
322.) Cf. Cowley, Davideis, i : — 

"Nothing is there To come, and nothing Past, 
But an Eter7ial Now does always last." 

Cowley says in his note that this is a translation of " Nunc stans," the 
name given to Eternity by Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen. 



448 NOTES 

265 146. The poet : e.g., Swift. 

266 180-182. Cf. "Passing of Arthur," 18-21 ; "The Sisters," 224- 
226: — 

1 think this gross hard-seeming world 
Is our misshaping vision of tlie Powers 
Behind the world, that make our griefs our gains. 

See also Mem., II, 68. 

267 191-194. " One loses in ' The Ancient Sage ' that keen insistence 
of the earlier poems [e.g.. In Mem., xlvii] on a separate consciousness 
continued after death." (Gwynn, p. 93.) 

267 204. Cf. " Why should we weep for those who die '\ in Poems 
by Two Brothers, and Alem., II, 18. 

268 216-228. Cf. Tennyson's First Sonnet, " The Two Voices," 355- 
384, "Far — Far — Away," "Tears, idle tears," "No More;' In Mem., 
xliv; Henry Vaughan's "The Retreat," and, of course, Wordsworth's 
"Ode on the Intimations of Immortahty," and his Essay upon Epi- 
taphs, given in his notes to The Excursion (Globe Edition, p. 810). 
Neither Wordsworth nor Tennyson uses this shadowy Platonic doctrine 
of a prenatal state as an argument, but simply as " an element in our 
instincts of immortality." 

268 229-239. This trance experience, which the Neo-Platonists 
called " union with the Divine," and modern psychologists term " Dis- 
sociation," is described also in In Mem., xcv, 33-48. Cf. " The Mystic," 
36-40; "Sir Galahad," 69-72; The Princess, i, 14-18; "The Holy 
Grail," 906-915. Tennyson wrote: "A kind of waking trance I have 
frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. 
This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two 
or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the 
intensity of the consciousness of individuahty, the individuality itself 
seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a 
confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, 
the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was 
an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personahty (if so it were) 
seeming no extinction but the only true life." {Mem., I, 320. Cf. II, 
473.) Ecstasies like this have been told of by many another mystic 
and genius — Plotinus, Porphyry, St. Theresa, Sir Thomas Browne, 
Wordsworth, Shelley, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Goethe, etc. 
The method employed by Tennyson to throw himself into the trance 
is said to have been familiar to the mediaeval Arabs. {Notices et 



"FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL" 449 

Extraits des MSS. de la Bibliotheque Imperiale, I, xix, pp. 643-645, 
cited by Lang.) 

269 253 ff. Lao-Tsze's doctrine of laissez-faire (v, i ; Ivii, 3) is in 
striking contrast to this praise of active benevolence, but in lii, i, 3, he 
commends moderation in conduct and dress. 

269 254. The figure seems suggested by The Merchant of Venice, 
ii, 7, 63. 

"FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL" (Page 270) 

Written at Wegner's Wells, on Hindhead, near Aldworth, probably 
in 1869 ; first published in The Holy Grail volume of that year. {JMevi., 
II, 209.) According, however, to an unpublished memoir by the 
daughter of Sir John Simeon, the lines were made at Farringford. 
(V. C. S. O'Connor, in The Cenhiry, December 1897.) The idea of 
the unity in all Nature has often been expressed. Tennyson seels 
the underlying meaning of that unity. Cf. Wordsworth's " The Prim- 
rose of the Rock," and Dowden's note on the poem (Athenaeum Press 
edition of Wordsworth, p. 478). 

The metre is rough and irregular, perhaps anapaestic rather than 
anything else. The first two bars in 1. 5 are anapaestic. (See Mem.y 
n, 94-) 

THE HIGHER PANTHEISM (Page 270) 

Written in 1867 {Mem., II, 48), read at the first meeting of the 
Metaphysical Society, June 2, 1869, and printed with The Holy Grail 
in December. Tennyson as a philosopher was an "objective idealist," 
i.e., he believed that all reality is spiritual, and that the material world 
exists only as a form of activity, a "shadow," of the mind of God. (See 
Alem., II, 68, 69, 90, 424 ; Wilfrid Ward in The New Review, XV, 94 ; 
" The Sisters," 224-226 ; " De Profundis," 30, 31 ; " The Ancient Sage," 
50-52, 108, 178-181; "God and the Universe," 6 ; "Akbar's Dream," 
II 5-1 17; Sneath, The Mind of Teimyson, pp. 64 ff.) The doctrine of 
this poem is that God lives in the world ; that we live and move and 
have our being in Him ; and that the human spirit is distinct from the 
Divine Spirit by conscious personality. This is not pantheism in the 
common sense of the word. It is a higher truth ; for while it teaches 
that God is in the Visible All, it denies that the Visible All expresses 
the whole of God. The manifestation of God in the world is dark, 



450 



NOTES 



broken, distorted, because we ourselves are imperfect. (See 11. 7, 10, 
16.) Cf. Wordsworth, " Tintern Abbey": — 

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," etc. ; 
and Shelley, " Hellas " (Globe Edition, p. 446) : — 

"This Whole 
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers, . . . 
Is but a vision; . . . 
Nought is but that which feels itself to be." 

The poem is written in a six-stress verse of general dactylic rhythm ; 
the lines rhyming in couplets ; the final light syllable, or syllables, 
cut away. Anacrusis occurs in six lines ; in 1. 1 7 it is two-syllabled. 
The obscure, paradoxical style is parodied by Swinburne in The 
Heptalogia. 

270 2. Cf. Romans, i, 20. 

270 5. This weight of body and limb, etc. : Cf. /« Mem., xlv. 

270 8. That which has replaced thou, that hast, the reading of 
1869. 

271 11, 12. Cf. Psalm Ixv, 2 ; Romans, viii, 16; Acts, xvii, 27. This is 
the truth of Prayer. 

271 14. The thunder is yet His voice : Cf. Psalm Ixxvii, 18. This 
is the truth of Providence. 

271 15. No God at all, says the fool : Psalm xiv, i. 
271 17. Cf. I Cor., ii, 9 (Rev. Version). 

WILL (Page 271) 

First published in Maud, and Other Poems, 1855; "^ characteristic 
utterance of Tennyson's cardinal doctrine of Free Will. 

The metre is iambic ; the lines vary from four to five stresses. 
The onomatopoeia in 11. 7-9, 16, is admirable, as is the paronomasia 
in 1. 13. 

271 6-9. For the simile, cf. Iliad, xv, 618-621 ; Aeneid, vii, 586-590 ; 
x, 693-696 ; and Marcus Aurelius, iv, 49 : " Thou must be like a prom- 
ontory of the sea, against which the waves bear continually, yet it 
both stands itself, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and 
quieted." 

272 19. A wrinkle of the monstrous hill: Cf. Princess, iv, 4, 
" wrinkled precipices." 

272 20. Seen through dry, desert air, distant objects are greatly 
dwarfed. 



WAGES 451 



WAGES (Page 272) 

Written in 1867 {Mem., II, 49) ; published in February 1868, in 
Maanillan' s Magazine, and in 1869 in The Holy Grail. It was one of 
Tennyson's chosen poems. J. A. Symonds quotes him as saying, " I 
cannot but think moral good is the crown of man. But what is it 
without immortality ? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. If 
I knew that the world were coming to an end in six hours, would I give 
my money to a starving beggar?" {The Centtiry, May 1893.) Cf. "A 
Voice Spake Out of the Skies " ; " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 
65, 66, 71, 72; In Mem., Ixxxii, 9-12"; "The Silent Voices";' "The 
Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale." 

The metre is dactylic six-stress verse, with variations and the last 
bar incomplete. The verses are arranged in five-line stanzas, and the 
fifth line of the second stanza echoes the fifth line of the first. 

272 6. The wages of sin is death : Cf. Romans, vi, 23. 



THE DESERTED HOUSE (Page 273) 

Published in Poejus, Chiefly Lyrical, but not reprinted until 1848. 
For the scriptural allusions in this allegory of the body deserted by the 
soul, see 2 Cor., v, i ; i Cor., xv, 52 ; Ecclesiastes, xii, 3, 4. 

The measure is mixed trochaic and iambic ; the lines vary in length 
in the first and last strophes ; elsewhere they have four stresses. The 
rhyme-order in the quatrains is not fixed. It is the unexpected pro- 
longation of the concluding stanza, with its iambic swell, that gives 
impressiveness to the versification. 



"BREAK, BREAK, BREAK" (Page 274) 

This poem was " made in a Lincolnshire lane at 5 o'clock in the 
morning between blossoming hedges" {Mem., I, 190), but the poet's 
thoughts were far away at Clevedon, where the dead body of Arthur 
Hallam was lying by the sea. First published in 1842. See R. H. 
Hutton, Literary Essays, p. 372. 

The metre is irregular in rhythm and in structure. The pievailing 
accent is anapaestic. LI. 6 and 8 may be regarded as normal ; each of 
them contains three bars, with two light syllables and one accented 
syllable in each bar. In 1. i the light syllables are omitted, but the 



452 NOTES 

time is preserved by the three lojig pauses. In 1. 2, instead of three 
syllables, two light and one heavy, we have two accented syllables in 
each of the last two bars. The other variations are similar. All the 
quatrains have alternate rhyme ; but the first two are written through- 
out in three-stress verse, while the last two change to a sort of " poulter's 
measure " by adding a fourth bar to the third line. The effect of these 
delicate variations is exquisite. 

274 11. Cf. InMef/i., vii, 5, "A hand that can be clasp'd no more "; 
and xiii, 6, 7 : — 

And, where warm hands have prest and closed, 
Silence, till I be silent too. 

And contrast cxix, 12, " I take the pressure of thine hand." 



IN THE VALLEY OF CAUTERETZ (Page 274) 

In the summer of 1S30, Tennyson and Hallam went to the Pyrenees 
with money for Torrijos, the leader of th j revolt against Ferdinand VII. 
In August 1 86 1 Tennyson returned to the beautiful valley, and wrote 
this lyric " after hearing the voice of the torrent seemingly sound deeper 
as the night grew." {Mem., I, 474.) A. LI. Clough was at Cauteretz at 
the same time, and his letters give a pleasant account of his meeting 
with Tennyson. [Remains, I, 264-269.) First published in Enoch 
Arden, etc., 1864. 

The poem is in an irregular six-stress verse with mixed trochaic and 
iambic movement. The first " voice " in 1. 10 seems equivalent in length 
to two syllables. 

274 4. Two and thirty years ago : Tennyson was provoked at this 
inaccuracy, and as late as 1S92 thought of substituting one and thirty. 
(Afem^, I, 475.) 

274 10. Contrast "Break, break, break," 11, 12. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM A. H. H. 
(Page 275) 

The death of Arthur Henry Hallam was the occasion of this, the 
greatest elegy of the nineteenth centuiy, the longest and most impor- 
tant of Tennyson's poems on the problems of doubt and faith, the poem 
in which he made the strongest and widest impression on contemporary 
thought. Arthur Hallam was the son of Henry Hallam, the historian, 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 453 

and was born in London, Feb. i, 181 1. He was at Eton from 1822 to 
1827 and met Gladstone there. During a residence of eight months 
in Italy he acquired a passionate admiration for Italian poetry. He 
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1828, where he became 
acquainted with Tennyson and was a leading member of " The Apos- 
tles." He won several prizes for essays and orations, but w^as defeated 
by his friend in the " Timbuctoo " competition for the Chancellor's Medal. 
He took his degree in January 1832. He and Tennyson made summer 
trips together, to the Pyrenees in 1830, and down the Rhine in 1832. 
He became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia. After graduation he 
resided in London with his father, and began the study of law. He 
accompanied his father to the Continent in August 1833, and died sud- 
denly in Vienna on September 1 5. His body was conveyed by sailing 
vessel to England, and was buried on Jan. 3, 1834, in the chancel of 
Clevedon Church in Somersetshire. His essays and occasional verse 
were collected and pubhshed in a volume of Remains (1834), His 
character was so pure and so noble that he seemed to those who knew 
him well like a being from another world. His friends looked forward 
to a most brilliant future for him. Said Gladstone: — " It would be 
easy to show what, in the varied forms of human excellence, he might, 
had life been granted him, have accomplished ; much more difficult to 
point the finger and to say, 'This he never could have done.' " {Glean- 
ings of Bast Years, II, 137.) 

In Memoriam was begun very soon after Hallam's death, and was 
published in 1850. We have comparatively little evidence about the 
time of the writing of particular sections. Their order of arrangement 
is by no means indicative of their order of composition. " The general 
way of its being written," said Tennyson, " was so queer that if there 
were a blank space I would put in a poem." The Prologue is dated 
1849. Among the sections first written were ix, xxxi, Ixxxv, xxviii. 
{Mem., I, 109.) Section civ refers to the new home of the Tennysons 
at High Beech, Epping Forest, where they lived 1837-1840. Section 
Ixxxvi was written at Barmouth, which the poet visited in 1839. {Mem., 
^' 173' Z^Z) From the Prologue, 42, and the Epilogue, 21 f, we gain 
the impression that most of the poems were written considerably before 
1849, "^^^ even before 1842. The testimony of Edmund Lushington 
{Mem., I, 202, 203) is to the same effect. The sections about Evolution 
are reported to have " been read by his friends some years before the 
publication of the Vestiges of Creation in 1844." {Mem., I, 223.) It is 
not stated just which parts are meant, but liv, Iv, cxviii, and cxx seem 



454 NOTES 

included. If 1. 20 of xxi refers to the astronomical discoveries of 1846- 
1848, its date must be about that time. Sections xc, 22, and cxix, 8, 
doubtfully imply a late date. That is about all one can say in regard 
to the parts here printed. (See Bradley, 12-18.) Tennyson mentions 
among the many localities where the poems were written Lincolnshire, 
London, Essex, Gloucestershire, Wales. 

The following may be quoted from the poet's comments on his 
"WTork: — "It must be remembered that this is a poem, 7iot an actual 
biography. ... It was meant to be a kind of Divitta Commedia, end- 
ing with happiness. . . . The different moods of sorrow as in a drama 
are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffer- 
ing will find answer and relief only thro' Faith in a God of Love. ' I ' 
is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the 
human race speaking thro' him." {Mem., I, 304.) 

Though the poem was some sixteen years in composition, the internal 
action covers less than three years ; i.e., it begins in the fall of Hallam's 
death (1833), and extends into the spring of 1836. This is indicated by 
the three Christmas sections (xxviii, Ixxviii, civ), which Tennyson says 
mark the divisions of the poem. {Mem., I, 305.) To Mr. Knowles ( The 
Nineteenth Century, XXXIII, 182) he gave a nine-fold division: i-viii, 
ix-xx, xx-xxvii, xxviii-xlix, 1-lviii, lix-lxxi, Ixxii-xcviii, xcix-ciii, civ- 
cxxxi ; this analysis is elaborated in The Poetry of Tennyson, pp. 131-1 51. 
The point where the prevailing tone changes from sorrow to' joy may 
be placed at Ixxxv. Enough of the poem has been retained here per- 
haps to indicate the trends of thought. In the form he chose — a series 
of short poems, making up a more or less unified elegy — Tennyson 
may have been influenced by Petrarch's Sonnets and Canzoni To Laura 
in Death. 

Tennyson believed himself the originator of the metre of In Memo- 
riam. In this he was mistaken. The " close " iambic quatrain, with 
eight syllables to the line, was used by several French poets of the six- 
teenth century (e.g., by Clement Marot in his chanson, " Je suis ayme 
de la plus belle," 1524). In English the following instances may be 
noticed before the publication of In Memoriam : — Sir Philip Sidney 
(d. 1586), "P.salm xxxvii" (with double rhyme in 11. 2 and 3) ; Ben 
Jonson, Chorus in Act ii of Catiline (161 1), and Underwoods, xxxix 
(1641) ; Francis Davison (d. 1619), "Paraphrase of Psalm cxxv " ; 
George Sandys, Paraphrase upon the Psabnes xiv, xxx, Ixxiv, cxl, etc. ; 
Christopher Plarvey, "The Epiphany" in The Synagogue (1640); Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648), "Ditty" {Poetns, p. 41) and "An Ode 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 



455 



upon a Question moved whether Love should continue forever " ; 
William Somerville, "Fable viii" (1727); Charles Jennens, Daniel's 
song about the w^riting on the wall, in the Oratorio of Belshazzar (1745) ; 
John Langhome (d. 1779), "An Ode to the Genius of Westmoreland"; 
W. S. Landor, in Forster's Life, p. 27, — "'Twas evening calm, when 
village maids " (1794) ; F. L. Courtier, " I wonder if her heart be still," 
in The Lyre of Love (1806); Robert Anderson, "The Poor Prude" 
{Poems, Carlisle, 1820); A. H. Clough, "Peschiera" (1849); F). G. 
Rossetti, "My Sister's Sleep" (1850). It may be that Tennyson had 
read one of these poems, or some other poem in the same metre, and 
retained a sub-conscious memory of its rhythm. It is as likely that he 
worked it out for himself, and " rediscovered " its adaptiveness as an 
elegiac quatrain. He had already used it in three poems written in 1833 
and published in 1842: — "You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease," "Love 
thou thy land," and "The Blackbird." It is a pensive form of verse, 
giving the impression of slow and recurrent thought, typified by the 
postponement of the rhyme to the end of the quatrain. The metre of 
/« Memoriam is free at once from the rigidity of the sonnet, the monot- 
ony of the couplet, the familiarity of the interwoven or alternate quatrain. 
It is a clear harp from which the master-player can draw divers tones. 
The pauses can be varied with almost the subtlety of effect that is pos- 
sible to blank verse. The sense may be allowed to overflow from line 
to line, and from quatrain to quatrain. (See, e.g., Ixxxvi.) Tennyson's 
favourite devices of alliteration (open and veiled), vowel melody, and 
verbal repetition will be found here in innumerable instances. An 
occasional irregularity strikes a discord that is part of the general har- 
mony (e.g., vii, 12 ; 1, 2). In the 41 sections here printed, there are 418 
rhymes, of which 40 are approximate (or about I in 10). See Corson, 
Primer of English Verse, pp. 71 ff. 

PROLOGUE (Page 275) 

This introduction, " the noblest English Christian poem which sev- 
eral centuries have seen " (Charles Kingsley), was written shortly before 
the publication of In Memoriam. It sums up the issue of its long inner 
struggle, and presents in brief the poet's creed. In a prayer to the 
personal Christ, he expresses his absolute and intuitive faith in Him 
as Love Incarnate ; he sees in Him the source of Life, the conqueror 
of Death, the assurance of Immortality, and, as the Supreme Man, the 
object and end of our free action. Although he trusts that Knowledge 



456 NOTES Hl^ 

is given to us by this Divine Love, yet Knowledge is insufficient and 
partial. Let it grow, therefore, but with more humility and accom- 
panied by Faith. He begs forgiveness for the imperfections of his 
life and song, and for his grief over one who still lives in Christ and 
Love. 

275 1, Love: used as by St. John (i John, iv), said Tennyson. 
{Mem., I, 312.) Collins compares George Herbert, "Love": — 

" Immortal Love, author of this great frame, 

Sprung from that beauty which can never fade; 

How hath man parcell'd out thy glorious name, 

And thrown it on the dust which thou hast made." 

275 2, 3. Cf. I Peter, i, 8. 

275 4. Among many parallels, cf. " The Ancient Sage," 57-67. 

275 5. These orbs : the planets, partly turned toward the sun, and 
partly in shadow. There is reference also to the darkness of Death. 
Cf. "The Death of the Duke of Clarence," 12 : — 

The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life, 
His shadow darkens earth. 

275 11, 12. Here Tennyson bases his belief in immortahty on the 
justice of God who has created man with the longing for immortality. 
Mr. Knowles quotes him as saying, " If there be a God that has made 
the earth and put this hope and passion into us, it must foreshow the 
truth. If it be not true, then no God, but a mocking fiend, created us." 
{The Nineteenth Century, XXXIII, 169. Cf. Mem., II, 105, 457.) Cf. 
Herbert, "The Discharge," " My God hath promised; he is just." 

275 15. Cf. "De Profundis," 55, 56. Freewill, like God and 
immortality, is not a knowable but a practical reality. 

275 19. Broken lights : refracted by the density of our medium. 
Cf. "Higher Pantheism," 10, 16. 

276 28. As before : i.e., before the modem movement of science 
and scepticism separated them. 

276 32. Thy light: the light of knowledge (cf. "beam," 24), over 
which, when it is divorced from faith, we grow vain and proud. 

276 33, 34. Cf, Young, Night Thoughts, ix, " His crimes forgive ! 
forgive his virtues, too ! " and Wordsworth, " Memorials of a Tour 
in Scotland" (1803), iii: — 

" The best of what we do and are, 
Just God, forgive ! " 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 457 

276 35, 36. Cf. Psahn xvi, 2, 3, and cxliii, 2. 

276 37. Cf. Ixxxv, 61, 62. 

276 41. Wild and wandering, as in Troilus and Cressida, i, i, 105. 

276 42. Wasted : rendered desolate, as in " Oriana," i. 

I (Page 276) 

Before his sorrow came, the poet believed that every experience may 
be the means to higher attainment. But now he cannot foresee how his 
loss is to be transmuted into gain. Grief and love seem to him inter- 
woven, and if, when grief fades, love fades too, far better is it to keep 
the excess of grief than reach a calmer state with shriveled affections. 

276 1. Him : Goethe, whom Tennyson placed " foremost among 
the moderns as a lyrical poet" because he is "consummate in so many- 
different styles," and among whose last words were — " Von Aender- 
ungen zu hoheren Aenderungen." {^Mevi.^ II, 391.) The figure in 3, 4 
may have been suggested by the famous sentence attributed to St. 
Augustine {Sermones Stipposititii, clxxvi) : — " De vitiis nostris scalam 
nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus " ; but it is confused by the change 
from a ladder to stepping-stones. Cf. also Longfellow, " The Ladder of 
St. Augustine " ; and Lowell, " On the Death of a Friend's Child." 

276 8. Interest of tears : Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet xxxi, 5-7. 

277 10. Cf. "Comus," 251, "The raven down Of darkness." 
(Bradley.) 

277 12. To dance with death : There may be an allusion to the 
ancient custom of dancing at funerals (Gatty), or to the favourite 
mediaeval allegory of the Dance of Death (as in Holbein's picture). 
For beat the ground cf. Horace, Odes, i, 37, 2, " Pulsanda tellus." 

277 13. The victor Hours : Cf. the poem by this name in Mem., I, 
307, originally No. cxxvii, omitted because it was thought redundant. 

277 15. Loved and lost : CL xxvii, 1 5 ; Ixxxv, 3. 

VII (Page 277) 

The poet revisits the house of his dead friend. His grief is brought 
home to him by the contrast with the days that are no more, and his 
mood finds reflection in the gloom of nature. 

277 2. Street : Wimpole Street, in London, where, at No. 67, 
Hallam lived while studying law. 

277 7. Like a guilty thing :*So of the ghost in Hamlet, i, i, 148. 



458 NOTES 

IX (Page 277) 

The poet's good wishes hover about the vessel which is bearing home- 
ward the body of the friend to whom he had given a love passing the love 
of women. Collins compares Horace, Odes^ i, 3, and Theocritus, vii, 53 ff. 

277 1. The Italian shore : The remains were embarked at Trieste, 
which belongs to Austria but has the air of an Italian city. 

277 2. Placid ocean-plains : Cf. " campos liquentis " {Aeneid, vi, 
724) and " placida aequora " (x, 103). 

278 10. Phosphor : Lucifer, the morning star. 

278 13. Cf. " Eleanore," 91, and "Enoch Arden," 593, "the great 
stars that globed themselves in heaven." 
278 18. Repeated in xvii, 20. 
278 20. Taken up and made the theme of Ixxix. 

XI (Page 278) 

A lyric on the calm of an autumnal morning. Here Nature illus- 
trates the emotion, and calls back to memory the figure on the ship in 
grim serenity of death. Observe the delicacy of observation, the skill 
of selection, the force of repetition, and the metrical imitation of the 
heaving sea. The scene, Tennyson told Gatty, was " some Lincoln- 
shire wold, from which the whole range from marsh to the sea was 
visible." (Cf. "Ode to Memory," 97-101.) 

278 11. Lessening: in perspective, as the plain nears the sea. 

278 12. Bounding : limiting. 

XIX (Page 279) 

Hallam's body was disembarked at Dover, and thence conveyed to 
St. Andrew's Church, which stands on a lonely hill, half a mile south 
of Clevedon, overlooking the Severn where it flows into the Bristol 
Channel. The waves can be heard lapping on the crags not a hundred 
yards away. The central idea of the poem is based upon an analogy. 
The Wye enters the Severn a little above Clevedon. For about half its 
course it is tidal. When the tide rises, its movement seaward is checked, 
its rapids are filled, and its purling murmur silenced. The babbling 
noise becomes audible again when the tide ebbs. So when the poet's 
heart is full of grief he cannot sing; but with the reflux of passionate 
sovrow comes the possibility of words. This section, like " Tears, idle 
tears," is said by Bradley to have been written in Tintern Abbey. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 459 

XXI (Page 280) 

The poet answers those who criticise his notes of sorrow. One 
accuses him of sentimentaUsm, another of vanity, a third of selfish 
isolation in a time of public danger and scientific marvels. He justi- 
fies himself by the greatness of the man for whom he mourns, and 
the spontaneity of the song to his memory. See Fitzgerald's letter to 
Donne, Jan. 29, 1845: — "A. T. has near a volume of poems — elegiac 
— in memory of Arthur Hallam. Don't you think the world wants 
other notes than elegiac now .'' " 

It is at least a plausible conjecture that this section is of late date, 
perhaps 1848. In that year the Chartist movement, after a lull of six 
years, broke out again with renewed vigour (15, 16). LI. 18-20 may 
well refer to the great discoveries by Lassell and others in 1846- 1848 : — 
Neptune (Sept. 23, 1846), its satelUte (Oct. 10, 1846), the eighth satellite 
of Saturn (Sept. 19, 1848). 

280 1. That rests below: As Tennyson did not see Clevedon 
until after the publication of In Memoriani {Mein., I, 305), he may 
have imagined that the body was buried in the churchyard. In 
reality it lies beneath the manor aisle within the building. 

280 4. Pipes : When an intensely modern poet adopts the Vir- 
gilian "pastoral reed," he seems artificial. Cf. "A Small Sweet 
Idyl," 27. 

280 20. Moon : satellite, or, perhaps, planet or star, though of the 
word in this last sense I have not found an instance in Tennyson. 
Bradley compares xcvii, 22, and Mem., II, 336. 

280 23, 24. Cf. Lamartine, " Le Poete Mourant," — " Je chantais . . . 
Comme I'oiseau gemit " ; and Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrja/ire, II, 
xi, — " Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt," — which Carlyle translated in 
1824, " I sing but as the linnet sings." 

281 25. One is glad replaced unto one, the reading of 1850, 1851. 
281 27. One is sad replaced iinto one, the reading of 1850, 1851. 



XXIII (Page 281) 

The poet puts himself at the threshold of Death, and from there 
looks back upon the pathway which he walked once not alone, but 
with a friend. He thinks of their communion with Nature and poetry, 
of their intimate sympathy in thought and imagination, and of that 
divine time when for them all life was suffused with the joy of Spring. 



46o NOTES 

281 4. The Shadow : repeated from xxii, 1 2, 20. Cf. Paradise 
Lost, ii, 669. 

281 5. Death will resolve the mysteries about which in life wx 
form various beliefs without knowledge. Cf. xxvi, 15. 

281 12. Pan : god of flocks and shepherds, and symbol of universal 
Nature. 

281 15, 16. Cf. Pope, " Eloisa to Abelard," 95 : — " Ev'n thought 
meets thought, ere from the lips it part." 

282 22, 24. Argive : Greek. So, many a flute of Arcady stands for 
Greek poetry, or perhaps for idyllic poetry in general. His father says 
of Arthur {Remains, xxiv) : " He had not read nearly so much of the 
Greek and Latin Historians, as of the Philosophers and Poets." Plato 
especially was the philosopher he admired, and, among the poets, 
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, and Bion. 

XXVII (Page 282) 

The experience of love, says the poet, though it bring in its train the 
experience of sorrow, is far better than that dull content which is made 
possible by a defect in sensibiUty. Goethe expresses part of the idea 
in Faust, ii, 1 659-1 660: — 

" Doch im Erstarren such' ich nicht mein Heil, 
Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Theil." 

282 2. Noble rage : a phrase of Gray's (" Elegy," 51). 

282 5-8. See Mem., I, 170. 

282 6. The field of time : " as having no future life." (Palgrave.) 

282 15, 16. Repeated in Ixxxv, 3, 4. Cf. A. H. Clough's " Peschiera" 

"What voice did on my spirit fall, 
Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost ? 
"Tis better to have fought and lost. 
Than never to have fought at all.'" 

It seems likely that Clough had seen some of In Memoriam in manu- 
script ; section Ixxxv was written in 1833. Two trivial parallels to 
the turn of expression have been found : Congreve, The Way of the 
World, ii, i, "'Tis better to be left, than never to have been loved," 
and Campbell, " The Jilted Nymph " : — 

" Better be courted and jilted 
Than never be courted at all." 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 461 

XXVIII (Page 282) 

As the first Christmas approaches after Arthur's death, the poet 
hears the church bells of the neighbouring villages. They bring to him 
the sorrow of contrast, but they bring too the song of the angels pro- 
claiming joy at the birth of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life. 

283 5. Four hamlets : From Rawnsley, p. 1 2, it seems likely that 
these were Tetford, Hagg, Langton, and Ormsby, though so many 
churches near Somersby have peals that it is impossible to be certain. 
It is the custom in Lincolnshire to ring for a month or six weeks before 
Christmas. 

283 9-12. Apparently each church has four bells, the sounds of 
which are represented in the four phrases of 11. 11, 12. See Luke, ii, 14. 

283 13. This year : 1833, as is made certain by xxx, 16. 

283 18. When a boy: Cf. " Far — Far — Away," 4-8. So Faust 
when about to quaff his cup of poison is deterred by the ringing of the 
Easter bells, which recalls to him the memories of early days. {Faust, 
pt. i, 762-784.) 

XXXI (Page 283) 

The poet now begins to think less of the past and more of the pres- 
ent. Recalling the beautiful story of Lazarus he wonders into what 
state he went, w^hether he retained there his sympathy with the living, 
and why so much was left unrevealed. See The Poetry of Tennyson^ 
p. 258. Browning's poem, "An Epistle of Karshish," treats the miracle 
from another point of view, — the effect of the experience of death upon 
Lazarus in his later life. 

283 5-8. Contrast Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, i, 21, "I 
can read . . . that Lazarus was raised from the dead, yet not demand 
where in the interim his soul waited." (Quoted by Bradley.) 

284 16. That Evangelist : St. John. See John, xi. 

XXXII (Page 284) 

Continuing to meditate upon Lazarus and Mary, the poet praises as 
the most blessed life that in which human love is merged in Love 
Divine, and in which all curiosity about the future beyond the grave is 
forgotten in simplicity of adoration. See The Poetry of Tennyson, 
p. 259. 

284 8. The Life indeed: Qi. John, xi, 25. 



462 NOTES 

284 9-12. See John, xii, 3. All subtle thought : such as that in 
xxxi, 5. Says Emerson (The Over-Soul): " Men ask of the immortaUty 
of the soul, and the employments of heaven, and the state of the sinner, 
and so forth. ... In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, 
there is no question of continuance." 

284 14. Cf. Prologue, 39, 40; cxxx, 11, 12. 

XXXIII (Page 285) 

The Mary-spirit of simple faith in the revealed truths of Christianity 
must be reverenced by the man whose religion is a rational one, obe- 
dient to the inner law of conscience and free from any outward law of 
authority. Her faith is as pure as his, and in it she is happier, more 
active in good works, and less likely to fall before temptation. 

285 1. After toil and storm : like Hallam, as described in xcvi, 
13-16, except that Hallam emerged stronger in his Christianity. 

285 3. The expression is puqDosely vague ; possibly it conveys a 
hint of pantheism ; more likely it is merely a contrast with 1. 4, to show 
that his faith is not concentrated in any formal dogma. 

285 4. Form : Tennyson always refused to formulate his creed, and 
disliked definitions of spiritual truths, because he believed the truths 
transcendently greater than human expression. (See Mem., I, 309-311.) 
But he should not be identified with the man addressed in this section, 
for he himself has often " linked a truth divine " to the revelation of 
God in Christ. His emphasis on the world's necessity of forms is 
mentioned in Mem., II, 420, and "Akbar's Dream," 119-143. 

285 5. Thy sister: The brother is, of course, not to be identified 
with Lazarus. 

285 6. Her early Heaven: her life on earth which her faith has 
made heavenly. 

285 11. The flesh and blood: the Incarnation. 

285 14. The law within : The same phrase occurs in The Princess, 
V, 181. 

285 16. Type : refers to " the flesh and blood" (1. 1 1). 

XXXVI (Page 285) 

The great spiritual truths (such as God, Freedom, Immortality) are 
perhaps intuitive, but the inner disclosure about them is so obscure 
that we owe every blessing to Christ who made them clear enough 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 463 

in His earthly life for him who runs to read. When questions were 
written to Tennyson about Christ he would instruct his son 'to answer 
for him that he had given his belief in In Memoriam^^ pointing to this 
section. {Mem., I, 325.) 

285 1, 2. Cf. " The Two Voices," 304-309. 

285 5-8, An idea which Macaulay had dwelt upon with gorgeous 
rhetoric in his Essay on Milton, \ 38. Cf. "Akbar's Uream," 1 31-133. 
Closest words : words which state the doctrines of theology accurately. 
A tale : the Parables ; or perhaps the Gospel narrative itself. 

286 9. The Word: the A670S, as used by St. John (i, 14), "the 
Revelation of the Eternal Thought of the Universe." {Me?n., I, 312.) 

286 13-16. Collins compares Cranmer's Preface to the Bible: "For 
the Holy Ghost has so ordered and attempered the. Scriptures that in 
them as well publicans, fishers, shepherds may find their edifications 
as great doctors their erudition." 

286 15. Those wild eyes : the eyes of the savage islanders of the 
Pacific. 

XLV (Page 2S6) 

Perhaps, the poet thinks, the object of the soul's experience in the 
body is to develop the sense of individuality, with memory, which may 
be carried over into the new Ufe beyond death. The description of the 
growth of self-consciousness (1-12) has not been impaired by modern 
psychological investigations. 

286 9. Rounds : " becomes an orb, detached from the surrounding 
nebula." (Bradley.) 

286 11. Binds: Cf. Epilogue, 124: — 

A soul shall draw from out the vast 
And strike his being into bounds. 

Tennyson seems to believe in pre-existence, but to consider the pre- 
existent state as impersonal, " merged in the general soul." See " De 
Profundis." 

XLVii (Page 287) 

The contrary belief, that individuality is ultimately lost and the soul 
at death absorbed in Universal God, is vague and repellent to Love, 
which demands to know its personal object forever. Even if there 
were a final loss of self in light (to which Tennyson does not commit 
himself), Love would crave at least a moment of farewell before 



464 NOTES 

its resumption into the Great Being. See The Poetry of Tennyson, 
p. 271. 

287 2, 3. Move his rounds : go through hfe. There is probably no 
reference to the use of " rounds " in xlv, 9. Fusing all The skirts of 
self: mehing the hmits or bounds of separate existence. The phrase 
is vague and mixed. 

287 13. The last . . . height : the last of the many states of indi- 
vidual existence. Cf. Ixxxii, 6-8 ; " The Ring," 38-43. As Bradley 
observes, " landing-place " is not quite appropriate to the figure. 

287 14. Fade away: "into the Universal Spirit — but at least one 
last parting ! and always would want it again — of course." (Tenny- 
son's note to Knowles.) See what he says relative to this general 
subject in Mem., I, 319. 

287 16. Light : Davidson notes that Nirvana, on the other hand, 
means " the blowing out, the extinction of light." (Max Miiller, Chips 
from a German Workshop, I, 276.) Cf. George Eliot's description of 
the death of Jubal, in " The Legend of Jubal " : — 

" Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave. 
The All-creating Presence for his grave." 

"In answer to my father's profession of belief in 'individual immortal- 
ity,' " says the Memoir (II, 380), " Tyndall remarked, ' We may all be 
absorbed into the Godhead.' My father said, ' Suppose that He is the 
real person, and we are only relatively personal.' " 

L (Page 287) 

The poet longs for the presence of his friend's Spirit, to comfort him 
in hours of physical weakness and pain, when trust in God and human 
nature fails, and at last to guide him from Life into Eternity. 

287 2, 3. Cf. Shelley, The Cenei, iv, i : — 

" My blood is running up and down my veins ; 
A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle." 

287 7. Dust : the dust to which man returns. Some (e.g.,Tainsh) 
think the reference is to the sand of the hour-glass, which Time purpose- 
lessly scatters. Others (e.g., Robinson and Dowden) consider it a bold 
antithesis to a " wise building up of solid structures." 

287 8. A Fury slinging flame: The Furies are represented as 
carrying torches. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 465 

288 10. Flies: Cf. Samson Agonistes, 676; " Vastness," 4, 35; and 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 202. 



Liv (Page 28S) 

The poet expresses his trust that eveiy life, however marred by 
disease, sin, doubt, and heredity, however low in the order of nature, 
has a purpose and will come to ultimate good. This hope proceeds, 
not from knowledge, but from a craving of the heart, as instinctive as 
a child's ciy for light. Compare Wordsworth's assured tone in " The 
Old Cumberland Beggar," 11. 73 ff. ; but Wordsworth is thinking less 
of the future life than Tennyson. Cf. " The Vision of Sin." 

288 3. Pangs of nature : Cf. 1, 6. 
2S8 4. Taints of blood : Cf. iii, 1 5. 

289 18. An infant crying: Cf. cxxiv, 19, 20. 



LV (Page 289) 

This hope in universal immortality seems supported by the fact that 
it springs from our most Godlike traits, Love and Mercy. But it is so 
shaken by Nature's apparent disregard of the individual that the poet's 
failing faith falls back upon the cry of the heart to the Lord of all. 
See Mem., I, 313 ff., 170; and contrast "Faith," which speaks with a 
ringing note of confidence. 

289 7, 8. Tennyson here observes the phenomena of natural selec- 
tion, for which Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) was to offer an 
explanation. As Romanes says (^Darwin and After Darwin, I, 265), 
this is " a striking republication by Science of a general truth previously 
stated by Poetry." 

289 15. The great world's altar-stairs: "Altar" perhaps implies 
that this is another figure for prayer, like the " gold chain " of " Morte 
d'Arthur," 255. Cf. " The Princess," vii, 246, and " Timbuctoo," 



194 ff. 



That mighty stair 
Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds 
Of glory of heaven. 



289 20. The larger hope : Tennyson means by this, his son says 
{Mem., I, 321), "that the whole human race would through, perhaps, 
ages of suffering, be at length purified and saved, even those who now 
'better not with time.' " See The Poetry of Temtyson, p. 272. 



466 NOTES 

LXX (Page 290) 

When, in the dark, the poet seeks to fix the face of Arthur on his 
inner vision, it is all but lost in a phantasmagoria of grotesque shapes. 
Then, as the will grows quiescent, suddenly the features flash before 
him, and soothe his troubled soul. 

290 2. Cf. Hallam's Sonnet in Remains, p. 84 : — 

"Still am I free to close my happy eyes, 

And paint upon the gloom thy mimic form." 

290 4. Hollow masks : false images. 

290 8. Cf. Sophocles, Oed. Tyr., 67, TroXXds 5' bbov% eKdbvra (ppopri- 
dos v\dvoi$. 

2S0 9-12. Perhaps Tennyson has in mind here De Quincey's account 
of the "tyranny of the human face" and the "horror of tl\e crocodile," 
in 7Vic' Confessions ofaji Opium-Eater (Temple Classics Edition, 293-296). 



LXXiv (Page 290) 

As a resemblance to a relative is sometimes first noticed in a man 
when he is dead, so the poet realizes now, when imaging the face of his 
lost friend, his kinship with the great men of the world. But he can- 
not see all the similarity, nor will he tell what he does see, content in 
the thought that Arthur has added beauty to the darkness of Death. 

290 1-4. Sir Thomas Browne in his Letter to a Friend says, " Before 
our end, by sick and languishing alterations, we put on new visages : 
and in our retreat to earth, may fall upon such looks which from com- 
munity of seminal originals were before latent in us." He cites as an 
example of this " odd mortal symptom " a dying man who " maintained 
not his proper countenance, but looked like his uncle." 

290 7. Below: on earth. Others (e.g., Beeching), "who are dead." 

291 11, 12. Cf. Romeo and Juliet, v. 3, 85 ff., and Petrarch, Sonnets to 
Laura in Death, Ixxxi : — 

" Non pu6 far morte il dolce vise amaro; 
Ma '1 dolce viso dolce pub far morte." 

Lxxviii (Page 291) 

This section marks the second Christmas. Cf. xxviii. Without, all 
is silence and peace. Within, the poet's household enjoy the holiday 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 467 

games as though grief had faded away. But there is still a sense of 
loss, and regret has not really passed, but only become diffused in all 
the depths of being. 

291 3, 4. Compare the stormy winds and stormy feelings of xxx. 

291 5. Clog : log (dialect). 

291 11, 12. Tableaux vivants and blindman's buff. For "hood- 
man-blind," cf. Hanilet, iii, 4, 77. Tennyson has a fondness for such 
paraphrases of commonplace things. Cf. xcviii, 30-32. 

291 14. Mark. In 1850, 1851 : type, which was less concrete. 

291 17. Cf. " Early Sonnets," ix, 8, and Epilogue, 17, 18. 

291 18. Mystic frame: repeated from xxxvi, 2. Here "mystic" 
is used "perhaps as able to combine strangely conflicting emotions." 
(King.) 

Lxxxil (Page 292) 

The true bitterness of death lies not m the corruption of the body — 
for the body only clothes a stage in the spirit's growth ; nor in the loss 
of noble influence — for this survives elsewhere ; but in the interruption 
of personal intercourse. 

292 6. From state to state : Cf. " Two Voices," 351. 

* 292 7. These : refers to " changes," 1. 2. Shatter'd stalks : the 
husks, or outward covering, from which the fruit has been removed. 

292 8. Or. 1850: And. 

292 10. The use of virtue : Aristotle's xpr\(ji<i t7]s dpeTrjs. {Po/., vii, 
8, 1328 a, 38, etc.) 

292 14. Garners : stores itself up. This is the only example cited 
by the JVew Eiiglish Dictionary of its use intransitively. 

Lxxxiii (Page 292) 

The poet's heart, still bound in sorrow, looks forward to the approach 
of joy. His mood, as Genung says, answers to the promise of the 
Spring, " and goes forth congenially to meet it." 

292 1. The northern shore : England, as distinguished from south- 
ern lands of early spring. 

292 2. New-year : Spring, as in " The Throstle," 5. 

292 5. The clouded noons : which now overhang the land. 

293 9-12. Foxglove: Cf. "Two Voices," 72. Speedwell: Veronica 
Chamcedrys, abundant in Lincolnshire. Laburnums : Rawnsley (p. 18) 
notes an unusual growth of laburnum trees near Somersby. Cf. " To 



468 NOTES 

Mary Boyle," ii, 12, and Cowper's Task, vi, 149. Dropping-wells t 
" wells formed by dropping water from above " [JVew Efiglish Diction- 
ary), or wells which overflow in cascades. 

Lxxxv (Page 293) 

The lines which contain the central thought of In Memoriam are 
repeated at the beginning of this section (cf. xxvii, 14-16), but the 
change of tense from " feel " to " felt " announces that the turning 
point has come, and that joy is henceforth to be the regnant mood. 
The poet takes up three questions which have been put to him : 
(i) What sort of life he now leads t At first, he answers, grief 
benumbed him, but he was roused to activity by the sense of respon- 
sibility and the continuance of Arthur's influence. (2) Whether sorrow 
has weakened or strengthened his faith } He believes that Arthur has 
entered into the bliss and the immediate knowledge of the angelic 
spirits, and, less confidently, that he preserves a sympathy for his 
friend, and sees the final triumph of good. (3) Whether the loss of 
this first affection has incapacitated the poet for further friendships 
with living men ? Nay, the old love itself urges him to a new one, 
and a true friendship he now proffers to the questioner, though con- 
fessing that it can never have all the warmth of the first. 

293 5. true in word, etc. : Addressed to Edmund Law Lushington 
(1811-1893), an "Apostle," Professor of Greek in the University of 
Glasgow, and one of the most scholarly men of his time. His marriage 
in 1842 with Tennyson's youngest sister, Cecili^ is celebrated in the 
Epithalamium at the end of In Memoriam. 

294 21. Intelligences: angels, rulers and guiders <^i the heavens. 
The term goes back at least to Thomas Aquinas {Sum. TheoL, pt. I, 
q. 79, art. 10). Cf. Dante, Convito, ii, 5, and Paradise Lost, viii, 181. 

294 28. The cycled times : the successive periods of human prog- 
ress (cf. "Locksley Hall," 138, 184) as contrasted with the immediate 
(" fresh ") knowledge gained in heaven. 

294 33-36. A parenthetical apostrophe to Hallam as he was and is. 
" Yet " of 37 refers back to 29-32. 

294 38-40. The consciousness of free agency creates- the sense of 
responsibility, which gives us courage to face life or death. 

295 45-48. Another parenthesis. 

295 53. The imaginative woe : the grief that led to speculations 
on the great spiritual problems of immortality, evil, etc. ; not " imaginary." 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 469 

295 55. Cf. Ixxviii, 18. 

295 60. The mighty hopes: Quoted by Tennyson {Mem., I, 321) 
as though referring to hopes of immortahty, but surely the context 
impHes "hopes in the progress of the race" — "the Vision of the 
world, and all the wonder that will be." 

295 63, 64. Cf. " Gardener's Daughter," 4, 5. 

295 67. All-assuming: all-devouring. 

296 83, 84. Cf. Ixxxii, 15, 16. 

296 85. Nature : human nature. The poet asks whether it is 
possible for the happy spirits of heaven to feel the pain which is 
implied in sympathy, or whether theirs is a sympathy without pain ; 
and the answ^er of Arthur seems to suggest that all sorrow for earthly 
misery is lost in the reaUzation of ultimate good. (Cf. liv, 2.) 

297 101. If not so fresh belongs after " true." 
297 105. Apart : preeminently. 

297 113. Widow'd: Cf. ix, 18. 

297 119. Perhaps Oenothera (evening primrose), or better " the 
feeble or imperfect flowers sometimes put forth by the common 
primrose in autumn and early winter." (Bradley.) 

Lxxxvi (Page 297) 

The poet calls upon the West "Wind to fill his being with the new 
life of Spring, that Death and Doubt may give way to Peace. It is 
said that this section 'gives preeminently Tennyson's sense of the 
joyous peace in Nature,' and that he would quote it in this context 
along with his Spring and Bird songs. It was written at Barmouth, 
as the poet noted in his ow^n hand. {Mem., I, 313.) Cf. "The 
Lover's Tale," iii, 3-8, and the song, "O diviner Air" in "The Sisters." 
Corson says (p. 77), " There is no other section of In Memoriam in 
which the artistic motive of the stanza is so evident." 

297 1. Ambrosial air: So Matthew Green, The Spleen (Ward's 
English Poets, III, 202) : — 

" Where odorous plants in evening fair 
Breathe all around ambrosial air." 

297 2. Gorgeous gloom : Cf. Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimhii 
(1816), iii, "gorgeous glooms Of wall-flowers." 

297, 298 4, 5. Breathing bare The round of space : clearing the 
horizon, or the sky-arch, of clouds. 



470 



NOTES 



298 6. Dewy-tasselPd wood: Cf. Princess, i, 93, " dewy-tassell'd 
trees," upon which Hallam Tennyson comments, "Hung with catkins 
as in the hazel-wood." (See Wallace's edition of The Princess^ Cf. 
cii, 12. 

298 7. Horned : winding. Cf. " Dying Swan," 39, and Virgil, Ae7i., 
viii, 77, " Comiger fluvius." 

298 8, 9. Fan my brows and blow The fever : Note the chiastic 
alliteration. 

298 12. The fancy : " Imagination — the fancy — no particular 
fancy." (Tennyson to Knowles.) 

298 13-16. " The west wind rolling to the Eastern seas till it meets 
the evening star." (Tennyson to Knowles.) 

Lxxxviii (Page 298) 

As in the nightingale's song, joy is mingled with sorrow, so, when 
the poet would sing of grief, the sense of universal harmony turns the 
tone to gladness. 

298 2. Quicks: hawthorn-hedges. Cf. cxv, 2. 

298 5. Fierce extremes: Milton's phrase, Paradise Lost, vii, 272. 
Cf. " Gardener's Daughter," 248-251, and " Recollections of the Arabian 
Nights," 72-74. 

XC (Page 299) 

No man who had felt the height and fulness of love could have 
started the common heresy that, if the dead should return to earth, 
their presence would be unwelcome to their nearest and dearest. 
The poet, without one disloyal thought, longs for his lost friend's 
return. 

299 13,14. Illustrated, as Collins points out, by "The Soul in 
Purgatory" in Bulwer-Lytton's Pilgrims of the Rhine, ch. viii, and, 
in a sense, by " Enoch Arden " and Balzac's Colonel Chabert. 

299 19. Confusion worse than death : as in " The Lotos-Eaters," 
128. 

xcvi (Page 300) 

The poet warns the woman of simple faith against a misjudgment 
which she, in turn, is liable to commit. (Cf. xxxiii.) Doubt is not in 
itself evil, as she thinks, but the honest, courageous struggle with doubt 
may lead to a stronger faith. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 471 

300 5. One : undoubtedly Hallam. Cf. xcv, 29, 30 ; cix, 5, 6 ; Hal- 
lam's Remains, Sonnet on p. 75, and the letter quoted in the Preface, 
p. xxxi: "He was subject to occasional fits of mental depression, 
which gradually grew fewer and fainter, and had at length, I thought, 
disappeared, or merged in a peaceful Christian faith." 

300 11, 12. Because so much belief is traditional, inherited, accepted 
blindly and without testing, and therefore partakes of superstition; 
whereas " honest doubt " is a reverent search for the truth. For Ten- 
nyson's varying attitude on the function of doubt, cf. " Supposed Con- 
fessions," 142-150, 172-179; "The Sisters," 139; " Prefatory Sonnet to 
the ' Nineteenth Century,' " 14 ; " The Ancient Sage," 68 ; " Despair," 90. 

300 21-24. Cf. Exodus, xix, 16-19, and xxxii. 

CIV (Page 301) 

The third Christmas-tide. In contrast with xxviii, only one peal of 
bells is heard, and the sound is like the voice of a stranger, for the poet 
is on unfamiliar ground, not endeared to him by memory or hallowed 
by association with the dead. 

301 3. Waltham Abbey, lying in a hollow about two miles and a 
half from Beech Hill House, to which the Tennysons moved in 1837. 
The old Norman church is famous for its bells, on which celebrated 
peals have been rung for centuries. 

301 12. Unhallow'd : Cf. xcix, 8. 

cvi (Page 301) 

As the church bells proclaim the passing of the old year, the poet 
jubilantly calls upon them to ring out the old epoch of enervating 
grief, of strife, disease, and sin, and to ring in the new cycle of truth, 
benevolence, peace, and a Christlike humanity. 

301 3. Cf. " The Death of the Old Year." 

301 8. Cf. the inscription on the Thor Glocke at Strasburg, given 
in Haweis's Music and Morals, p. 369 : — 

" Das Bos hinaus das Gut hinein 
Zu lauten soil igr arbeit seyn." 

302 28. See Rev., xx, 2. 

302 32. The Christ that is to be : One of the things that Tennyson 
meant by this was — "when Christianity without bigotry will triumph " 
and "when the controversies of creeds shall have vanished." (Cf. 
"Akbar's Dream," 92-97.) Mem., I, 326. 



4/2 NOTES 

CXI (Page 302) 

The man, in whatever social rank, whose heart is full of baser 
instincts, cannot play the part of gentleman without showing, sooner 
or later, his real character. But Arthur's gentleness was natural, and 
his noble manners only the outward expression of a noble soul. 

302 1-4. Cf. " Gareth and Lynette," 418, 419 : — 

But Mark hath tarnish'd the great name of king, 
As Mark would sully the low state of churl. 

302 3. Him who grasps. In 1850, 1851 : who may grasp. 

303 7. Coltish : Cf. Cowper, " Progress of Error," 360, " Man's 
coltish disposition asks the thong." 

303 13. Best seem'd the thing he was. In 1850, 1851 : So wore 
his outward best. The change is noteworthy. The first reading had a 
faintly ridiculous suggestion, whereas the present one expresses the 
thought with Tennysonian subtlety. 

303 15, 16. Cf. " Guinevere," -^T^y 334. 

303 18. Villain : not " villainous," but " low-bred." 

CXV (Page 303) 

As Spring revives in Nature, regret revives in the poet's heart. 
303 2. Burgeons: buds. Cf. Princess, vii, 255. 

303 3. Flowering squares: Cf. "Gardener's Daughter," 75. 

304 7, 8. Cf. Shelley, " To a Skylark " ; Wordsworth, " To the 
Cuckoo " ; Goethe, "An die Entfenite " : — 

" Wenn, in dem blauen Raum verborgen, 
Hoch iiber ihn die Lerche singt." 

And Fatist, pt. I, 1094, 1095. 

304 I.'). Change their sky: a translation of Horace's "Coelum . . . 
mutant" (£"/., i, 11, 27). 

CXVIII (Page 304) 

The evolution of Nature suggests to the poet that the present life of 
man cannot be the last stage of development, but that he may rise into 
a higher race here on earth and move into a higher life beyond. But 
this can be accomplished for the race, only if the individual exemplifies 
the process of evolution within himself, by using life's discipline to 
subdue his lower nature. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 473 

304 1. Contem'plate : so accented in Ixxxiv, i, and "Marriage of 
Geraint," 533, but on the first syllable in " Palace of Art," 2 1 2. Time, 
The giant : alluding, perhaps, to the Titan Chronos. 

304 4. I.e., " as perishing like the body." Cf. " Two Voices," 326. 

304 6. Ampler day : Cf. Virgil's " Largior . . . aether" {Aen., vi, 640). 
304, 305 8-12. An allusion to the nebular hypothesis which Laplace 

set forth early in the nineteenth century. Cf. Princess, ii, 101-108; 
"Supposed Confessions," 146-150. The repetition of "seeming" indi- 
cates Tennyson's belief that these changes, disintegrations, and recom- • 
binations were not fortuitous. 

305 14. A higher race : Some (e.g., Robinson) inteipret this to 
mean a race, other than man, which shall replace him (cf. Maud, I, IV, 
St. vi), but it is better to take it, as in the introductoiy note, for a 
higher stage of man's own development. Cf. ciii, 35, Epilogue, 128, 
and Princess, vii, 279, and, on the whole passage. Browning, Paracelsus, 
V, 680 ff . 

305 18. Or. In 1850: And. This little change has made the pas- 
sage perplexing. The " or " seems to introduce a distinction between 
16, 17 and 18 ff. If this is so, the former passage describes the process 
of human development as chiefly passive, from the general standpoint 
of the evolutionary theory ; the latter describes it more as a moral dis- 
cipline, conscious, and voluntarily accepted and used by man. Tenny- 
son inclines to this latter view which makes free will a factor. (See 
11. 25-28.) 

305 26. Sensual feast : Shakespeare's phrase. {^Sonnet cxli, 8.) 
305 27. The beast : Tennyson thought that man's body may have 
been evolved from the lower animals, while his spiritual nature is 
"heaven-descended." Here "beast" may indicate merely man's baser 
passions. Cf. "Passing of Arthur," 26; " Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
After," 148; "The Ancient Sage," 276; "By an Evolutionist " ; "The 
Dawn," 18; "The Making of Man," 2. 



CXIX (Page 305) 

The poet visits once more in the early morning the London house of 
his lost friend. Cf. vii. The bitterness of regret has passed away, and 
even the great unlovely city is touched with the breath of spring. 

305 4. Carts coming in from the country with hay and clover and 
spring flowers. 

306 12. Thine hand: — which 'could be clasp'd no more' (vii, 5). 



474 NOTES 

CXX (Page 306) 

The poet, looking back upon his work, trusts he has come out 
victorious in his conflict with the idea that death ends all. If science 
should prove the creed of materialism, life would not be worth living. 
But for himself his native instinct proclaims this creed false. 

306 3. Magnetic: refers to the " electric force " of life (cxxv, 15). 
Mockeries, " because we imagine ourselves to be something more and 
higher than on that supposition we really are." (King.) 

306 4. See i Cor., xv, 32. 

306 9-12. Gatty says : " This is spoken ironically, and is a strong 
protest against materialism, but [quoting Tennyson] 'not against evolu- 
tion.' " The " greater ape " does not refer to the descent of man, but 
to the correspondence between man and beast on the materialistic 
basis. Born: italicised since 1875. 

CXXIII (Page 306) 

Though all the universe seems changing, the poet clings to his belief 
that the soul abides, and we shall meet again. This section illustrates 
Tennyson's interest in modern geology. Cf. "Wellington Ode," 259- 
265, and Shakespeare, Sojtiiet Ixiv. 

308 2. Hast thou: So in 1850, 1S51. In i860: thoti hast. Present 
reading restored in 187 1. 

• CXXIV (Page 307) 

God is to be found, not through Nature or through Reason, but 
through the imperative need of the human heart. 

307 5, 6. The poet rejects the old form of the teleological argu- 
ment, which used the order and harmony of the heavenly bodies and 
the mechanism of the eye and wing as evidences of design. See, e.g., 
the Bridgewater Treatises by Whewell, Roget, and Kirby. Cf. Mem., 
I, 44, 102, 314, and In Mem., Iv, Ivi, and contrast "Passing of 
Arthur," 9-1 1. 

307 11, 12. Refer to the geological changes of the preceding section. 

308 17-20. See Professor Henry Sidgwick's comments in Mem., 
I, 303. 

308 19, 20. Cf. liv, 18-20. 

308 21. What I am. \^\\W\ \^^o: what I seem. The alteration is 
important if it indicates a change on the poet's part from the belief 
that personality is phenomenal to the belief that it is essential. 



SELECTIONS FROM IN MEMORIAM 475 

308 24. Thro' nature : When once the poet has apprehended God 
by the feelings, then he can reaUze that God works through nature. 
But nature itself does not lead him to God. 



CXXVI (Page 30S) 

Love is the poet's king, and though he must for a time remain in the 
court on earth, Love keeps protecting watch of him, sends him sweet 
messages from his friend in the court above, and assures him that 
"God's in his heaven — all's right with the world." 

308 10-12. In 1850, 1851: — 

That moves about from place to place, 
And whispers to the vast of space 
Among the worlds, that all is well. 

cxxx (Page 308) 

The friend is felt as a spiritual presence in universal nature. This 
is not the pantheistic idea of Shelley's "Adonais," xlii, xliii, for Arthur 
remains the object of a personal affection, which ever increases and will 
last beyond death. 

308 3. Possibly reminiscent of Rev.^ xix, 17. 

308 4. Cf. Wordsworth, " Tintern Abbey," 97, " Whose dwelling is 
the light of setting suns." 

CXXX I (Page 309) 

The poet calls upon the immortal Free-Will of man to purify our 
deeds, that so we may pray to the Divine Will w^hich hears and helps, 
and may reach a faith in those great spiritual truths of which knowledge 
is not possible till death. 

309 1. Will: Tennyson explained this "as that which we know as 
Free-Will, the higher and enduring part of man. He held that there 
was an intimate connexion between the human and the divine, and that 
each individual will had a spiritual and eternal significance with relation 
... to the Supreme and Eternal Will." (Cf. 1. 8.) Mem., I, 319. 

309 2. All that seems : the phenomenal universe. Cf. first reading 
of cxxiv, 21. 

309 3. The spiritual rock: Cf. i Cor., x, 4. Christ is the rock 
from which springs the fountain of the will. Cf. " Will," 11, " heaven- 
descended will." 



476 NOTES 

309 5. Of. In 1S50: the. 

309 7. Conquer'd years: the "victor Hours" (i, 13) overcome by 
Love and Immortality. 

309 8. One that with us works: Cf. i Cor., iii, 9; Phil., ii, 13. 

309 9. This Hne, the " deeds " of 4, and many other passages show 
the close connection in the poet's mind between practical morality and 
faith. 

PREFATORY POEM TO MY BROTHER'S SONNETS 
(Page 310) 

Charles Tennyson was born July 4, 180S. In 1835 he was appointed 
curate of Tealby, and after about two years became vicar of Grasby, in 
charge of which parish he spent most of his life. Meantime he had 
taken the name of Turner in memory of a great-uncle whose estate he 
inherited. He died April 25, 1879. His first poetry was published in 
conjunction with his brother Alfred in Poems by Two Brothers, 1827. 
His subsequent volumes were Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces, 1830; Son- 
nets, 1864; Small Tableaux, 1868; Sonnets, Lyrics, and Translations, 
1873. In 1880, a volume of Collected Sonnets, Old and New, was pub- 
lished with this poem as a prelude. The sympathy between Alfred and 
Charles Tennyson was always of the closest and deepest nature. It is 
expressed in In Memoriam, Ixxix, and in Mem., II, 239. 

This poem was evidently written at Farringford. The " breakers " 
(1. 2) are referred to in " To the Rev. F. D. Maurice," 24, and the 
"park" in Mem., I, 412. The summer of 1879 "^^'^-S famous for its 
inclemency. 

The verse is iambic in movement, and the metre is in lines of 
alternately four and three stresses, arranged in quatrains with inter- 
woven rhyme. 

310 15, 16. These lines are cut upon the memorial tablet in Grasby 
Church. 

VASTNESS (Page 311) 

• 

Published in Macmillan^s Magazine, November 1S85, and in Demeter, 
etc., 1889. Tennyson's MS. note phrases the theme of this great chant 
of life and death : " What matters anything in this world without full 
faith in the Immortality of the Soul and of Love ? " {Mem., II, 343.) 
All life is but a series of reversions and contradictions, without a trace 
of meaning or importance, unless the hopes and affections which are 



VASTNESS 477 

raised here are to be realized hereafter. Cf. In Mem., xxxiv. See 
W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews, I, 156. 

The long reverberating roll of rhythm should be compared with 
" Wages " and " To Virgil." The metre is eight-stress dactylic, trun- 
cated, with the lines rhymed in couplets. As in the case of " Locksley 
Hall," it is hard to arrange the lines as quatrains, though here the 
pause always comes at the end, or in the middle, of the fourth bar. 
The crowded, almost turgid style at times passes the boundary line 
between poetry and rhetoric, and shows the slight weakness that over- 
took Tennyson at the end of life. 

311 4. Cf. Psalm viii, 3, 4; "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After"; 
and Tennyson's remarks to Miss Weld {The Contemporary Review, 
March 1S93). 

312 9. Innocence seethed in her mother's milk : Cf. Exodus xxiii, 
19 ; xxxiv, 26. 

312 ]2. All-heal: a number of plants (including Mistletoe and the 
Great Valerian) are so called, from supposed medicinal properties. 
312 13-16. These two couplets are not in the magazine edition. 

312 19, 20. In 1885: — 

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; Flattery gilding the rift of a 

throne ; 
Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty ; honest Poverty, bare to the bone ; 

313 22. Cf. " The Dead Prophet." 

313 24. Wilfrid Ward {New Review, July 1896) says that this was 
originally : — 

Debtless competence, comely children, happy household, sober and clean. 

But when Tennyson read it aloud to Ward and others, they smiled, 
and so he changed it. Golden mean : Horace's " aurea mediocritas " 
{Odes, ii, 10, 5). 

313 28. He that has naiPd all flesh to the Cross : Cf. Gal., 
V, 24. 

314 36. This line, according to Ward, was originally assigned to a 
separate speaker. Love and the instinct of immortality, says this new 
voice (or the old one in revulsion of feeling), are the assurances of 
immortality, for God, if he is God, could not allow them without ful- 
filling their promise. Cf. /« Me??i., Prologue, 11, 12; Mem., I, 321, 
II, 105, 457. 



478 NOTES 



CROSSING THE BAR (Page 314) 

This, the crowning lyric of Tennyson's life, came to him in a moment, 
in the October of his eighty-first year, as he was crossing the Solent to 
the Isle of Wight. {Metfi., II, 366. But see Rawnsley, p. 112.) He 
requested that it should be put at the end of all editions of his poems. 
Published in Demeter, etc., 1889. The interpretation has been much 
discussed, but presents no real difficulty. The "bar" is, of course, 
death ; the " sea \ is the great deep of eternity from which the soul 
comes and to which it goesi\(" De Profundis," 26-34, " The Coming 
of Arthur," 410); the "Pilot!" is "That Divine and Unseen Who is 
always guiding us." ^The soul embarks at evening, but as soon as the 
bar is crossed, the light of dawning breaks and reveals the Pilot. ' See 
W. Clark Russell's A Sea Queen (1883), ed. 1889, P- 5°' for a curious 
anticipation of the allegory. 

The metre is iambic, and the rhymes are interwoven, but the number 
of stresses to the line varies from five to two, and this gives the poet the 
freedom w'hich he desires. The short concluding line of the quatrain, 
coming after a long full third line, enforces the rhyme ; the " turn " in 
1. 8 is especially beautiful. The third quatrain echoes the cadence of 
the first. 

314 3. Cf . Chajles Kingsley's " The Three Fishers " : — 

" And the sooner it 's over, the sooner to sleep — 
And good-by to the bar and its moaning." 



314 15. Face to face: Cf. i Cor., xiii, i: 



A TENTATIVE CLASSIFICATION OF THE 
METRES OF TENNYSON 

(Based upon the arrangement of the Hnes.) 

I. Line by Line (i.e., lines unrhymed and without stanzaic grouping). 

(i) Five-stress iambic; Blank Verse: introduction to The Sea- 
Fairies; CEnone ; To . With the follpwing poem ; The Epic, Morie 

d^Arthicr; The Gardener^ s Daughter; Dora; Audley Court; Walk- 
ing to the Mail ; Edwin Morris ; St. Simeon Stylites ; Love and Duty ; 
The Golden Year; Ulysses; Tithomcs ; Godiva ; Enoch Arden; 
The Brook; Aylmer^s Field ; Sea Dreams ; Lucretius; The Princess ; 
A Dedication (" Dear, near and true ") ; Specimen of a Translation 
of the Iliad; Idylls of the King; The Lover^s Tale ; The Sisters (2); 
Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice; Sir fohn O Ideas tie ; Colum- 
bus ; De Profundis ; Achilles over the Trench; Tiresias ; The Ancient 
Sage ; To the Duke of Argyll ; To H. R. H. Princess Beatrice ; Queen 
Mary; Harold; Becket ; The Cup; The Falcon; The Promise of 
May; Demeter and Persephone ; The Ring; Romney's Remorse; 
The Foresters; The Death of CEnone; St. Telemachus ; Akbar's 
Dream; The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale ; \x\ixodi\xc- 
tion to The Hesperides ; The Ante-Chamber. [51 poems.] 

(2) Four- and five-stress trochaic: On the fubilee of Queen 
Victoria, 

(3) TviTo-stress, prevaihngly dactylic, imitation of early English 
alliterative measures : Battle of Brunanburh ; Merlin and The Gleam. 

(4) Two-, four-, and eight-stress dactylic : Kapiolani. 

(5) Five feet, quantitative, imitation of Catullus's Hendecasyl- 
labics : Hendecasyllabics. 

(6) Eight feet, quantitative, imitation of Catullus's Atys : 
Boddicea. 

479 



48o CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 

II. Groups of Two Lines {Couplets). 

(i) Three-stress iambic: A Voice spake out of the Skies. 

(2) Five-stress iambic; Heroic: The Vision 0/ Sin, \, \ ; satire 
in Sea Dreams; On One who affected an Effeminate Manner; To 
One who ran down the English. 

(3) Five-stress iambic, unrhymed : " Serenade," in The Friftcess, 
vii, stanzas 2, 3, 4. 

(4) Seven-stress iambic (with many six-stress hnes) : The May 
Queen ; The Flight. 

(5) Six-stress anapaestic (Tennyson's favourite ballad measure) : 
The Grandmother ; Northern Farmer. Old Style ; N^or them Farmer. 
New Style; The First QuarreA; Rizpah\; The Northern Cobbler; The 
Village Wife ; In the Children'' s Hospital ; The Voyage of Maeldnne ; 
The Wreck; Despair; Tomorrow; The Spinster'' s Sweet-Arts ; Ozvd 
Rod; The Bandifs Death; The Church-Warden atid the Curate; 
Charity. [17 poems.] 

(6) Four-stress trochaic: Heleji's Tower; Fairies' Song, in The 
Foresters, ii, 2. 

(7) Six-stress trochaic (?) : lit the 'Valley of Cautereiz. 

(8) Eight-stress trochaic: Locksley Hall; Locksley Hall Sixty 
Years After. 

(9) Nine-stress trochaic : To Virgil. 

(10) Three-stress dactylic : Leonine Elegiacs. 

(11) Six-stress dactylic: The Higher Pantheism ; Parnassus, i, ii. 

(12) Eight-stress dactylic : Vastness. 

(13) Five and six feet, quantitative, unrhymed (Elegiac Distich): 
On Translations of Ho?ner. 

III. Groups of Three Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i) Four-stress iambic triplets : The T^vo Voices; The Eagle. 

(2) Five-stress iambic triplets : Merlin's " Triplets of Old Time," 
in The Coming of Arthur. 

(3) Five-stress iambic couplets (Heroic) with full-length refrain 
line: Knights' Song, in The Coming of Arthur ; Lynette's Song, in 
Gareth and Lynette ; Enid's Song, in The Marriage of Geraint ; 
Vivien's Song, in Merlin and Vivien ; Elaine's Song, in Lancelot and 
Elaine; Novice's Song, in Guinevere. 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 481 

(4) Five-stress iambic, unrhymed : " The Swallow's Message," in 
The Princess, iv. 

(5) Nine-stress trochaic triplets : God and the Universe. 

B. Where the Lities vary iti Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Five-stress iambic couplets (Heroic) with short refrain line: 
Far — -far — aivay (three-stress refrain^ ; " To sleep, to sleep," in The 
Foresters, i, 3 (two-stress refrain). 

IV. Groups of Four Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i) Four-stress iambic quatrains, intei^woven : Song, (" The winds, 
as at their hour of birth " ) ; To f. S. ; " Move eastward, happy earth " 
(second stanza); The Sailor Boy; Literary Squabbles : Dedication 
to E. Fitzgerald and Epilogue of Tiresias (without division into quat- 
rains) ; The Watidei'er. In the following, two such quatrains are 
grouped in an eight-line stanza: The Miller'' s Daughter ; The Day- 
Dream (except the " Prologue," " L'Envoi," and " Epilogue," where 
the lines are printed continuously) ; The Voyage ; The Letters ; " The 
Battle," in The Princess. [12 poems.] 

(2) Four-stress iambic, alternate: Edward Gray; Lady Clare 
(with irregularities). 

(3) Four-stress iambic, close : To the Queen ; The Blackbird ; 
" You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease " ; " Love thou thy land " ; To 

, after reading a Life and Letters; To E. Z., on his Travels in 

Greece ; Ln Memoriam A. LL. IL. ; To the Marquis of Dufferifi and 
Ava ; To Ulysses ; The State S7)i an. [10 poems.] 

(4) Four-stress iambic, interrupted, extra syllables in last two 
lines: The Daisy ; To the Rev. F. D. Maurice ; To Professor febb. 

(5) Five-stress iambic, interwoven ; Heroic or Elegiac Quatrain : 
Epitaphs on Lord Stratford de Radcliffe, General Gordon, and Cax- 
ton ; The Play. 

(6) Five-stress iambic triplet with refrain line: Vivien's Song, in 
Balin and Balatt. 

(7) Five-stress iambic, unrhymed : " Serenade," in The Pt-incess, 
vii (stanzas i and 5). 

(8) Seven-stress iambic, interwoven : Happy. 



482 CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 

(9) Three-stress anapaestic (?), interwoven : Eleanor's Song, in 
Becket, Prologue. 

(10) Three-stress anapaestic, alternate: "Break, break, break." 
(The last two quatrains have an extra bar in the third line.) 

(11) Six-stress anapaestic, interwoven: Maud, I, i. 

(12) Three-stress trochaic, interwoven: The Flozuer. 

(13) Three-stress trochaic, alternate: Maud, I, xvii (without divi- 
sion into quatrains). 

(14) Four-stress trochaic, interwoven : The Lord of Burleigh ; 
The Vision of Sin, iv ; " Sweet my child, I live for thee," in IVie 
Princess, vi. 

(15) Eight-stress trochaic, interw'oven: Parnassus, iii. 

(16) Eight-stress trochaic, interrupted (catalectic except in third 
line) : Hymn, in Akbar''s Dream ; The Making of Man ; Faith. 

(17) Two-stress dactylic, alternate: Child-Songs, \\, "Minnie and 
Winnie"; Margery's Song, in Becket, iii, i. 

(18) Six-stress dactylic, interwoven : Beautifjil City. 

B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Iambic, interwoven, 5252: To Mary Boyle. 

(2) Iambic, inten\^oven, 5352: The Poet. 

(3) Iambic, Common Metre, 4343. (i) Interwoven : The Goose ; 
The Talking Oak ; Aviphion (two quatrains grouped in one stanza) ; 
St. Agnes'' Eve (three quatrains grouped in one stanza) ; Will Water- 
proofs Lyrical Monologue (two quatrains in one stanza) ; A Farewell ; 
The Song of the Brook, in The Brook; Song, in The Ancient Sage ; 
" Prologue " and " Epilogue " of The Charge of the Heavy Brigade 
(without division into quatrains) ; Prefatory Poetn to my Brother^s 
Sonnets; Mechanophilus ; The Little Maid, (ii) Alternate: Politics 
(without division into quatrains) ; Kate's Song, in The Foresters, i, i ; 
"I, loving Freedom for herself." [15 poems.] 

(4) Iambic, interwoven, 4443: "Of old sat Freedom on the 
heights " ; Freedom. 

(5) Iambic, interwoven, 5 3 5 3 : Sir fohn Franklin. 

(6) Iambic, interwoven, 5453: The Palace of Art. 

(7) Iambic, interwoven, 5553: A Dream of Fair Women. 

(8) Iambic, quantitative, Alcaics : Milton. 

(9) Mixed iambic and dactylic, interrupted, 4424: To the Master 
of Balliol. 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 483 

(10) Anapaestic (?), alternate, 3323: quatrains in The Dreamer. 

(11) Anapzestic, interwoven, 6262: To the Princess Frederica of 
Hanover on her Marriage. 

(12) Anapaestic, interwoven, 4343: The Dead Prophet (short first 
line in first two stanzas). 

(13) Anapaestic, alternate, 4343; The Spiteful Letter (internal 
rhyme in first and third lines). 

(14) Trochaic, alternate, 3232: Miriam's Song, in The Ring. 

(15) Trochaic, alternate, 2343: The Window., "When." 

(16) Trochaic, interwoven, 4343: The Captain. 

(17) Seven-stress trochaic triplet with three-stress refrain line: 
Queen's Song, in Qiieeii Alary, v, 2. 

(18) Four-stress dactylic (?) triplet with one-stress refrain line : 
Mother-Song, in Romneyi's Remorse. 

(19) Dactylic (?), alternate, 2333: Havelock. 

(20) Dactylic, interwoven or alternate, 4343: The Throstle. 

(21) Dactylic, alternate, 3343: The Window, "Marriage Morn- 
ing." (Two quatrains are grouped in one eight-line stanza. The 
third Hne of the second quatrain has but tljree stresses, except in 
stanza ii.) 

(22) Dactylic, interwoven, 6767: Hymn, in The Cup, ii. 

C. Where the Lines vary in Length iti the Different Stanzas. 

Requiescat (iambic, interwoven) ; The Voice and the Peak (ana- 
paestic, alternate) ; Maud, I, vii, xii (alternate) ; By an Evolutionist 
(interwoven) ; Crossing the Bar (iambic, interwoven). 

V. Groups of Five Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i) Four-stress iambic, ababb : "My life is full of weary days" 
(with variation in first stanza) ; On a Mourner. 

(2) Five-stress iambic, ababb: Song, in Pel leas and Ettarre 
(with variation in second stanza). 

(3) Five-stress iambic, unrhymed : " Tears, idle tears," in The 
Princess, iv ; " Our enemies have fall'n," in The Princess, vi. 

(4) Two-stress trochaic, a b c d b : The Oak. 

(5) Six-stress dactylic, ababb: Wages. 



484 CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 



B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Five-stress iambic close quatrain with two-stress refrain line: 
" Ask me no more," in The Princess, vii. 

(2) Common metre, alternate, with extra line introduced after 

the third to rhyme with it, ^ticcb. u -j^j-^g Little Grave," in The 
■' '43443 

Princess, ii ; England and America in ijSs. 

(3) Iambic, ^^^ (the quatrain of A Dream of Fair Women, 
with refrain line) : The Fleet. 

(4) Six-stress anapaestic close quatrain preceded by short refrain 
line, 26655: The Dawn (with variation in first and third stanzas). 

(5) Anapcestic, ^^ccb. Marian's Song, in The Foresters, i. i. 

(6) Anapsstic, 35553: The Window, "On the Hill." 

(7) Trochaic, ^^yba child-So7i<rs, i, "The City Child." 

\" '67775 -^ ' ' ^ 

(8) Dactylic, ^ h c b b . /,^ ^^^ Garden at Szuainston. 



VI. Groups of Six Lines. 

A. Where the Lijies are all of the same Length. 

(i) Four-stress iambic, a b c b c a : A Character. 

(2) Five-stress iambic, a b a b a b : In Memoriam — W. G. Ward. 

(3) Five-stress iambic if), abbbba: Count's Song, in The 
Falcon. 

(4) Four-stress anap^stic, a b a b x x : The Windozv, " No An- 
swer" (i). 

(5) Six-stress anapaestic, abcabc: Maud, I, iv. 

(6) Four-stress dactylic (?), ab acbb: Edith's Song, in Harold, 
i, 2 (internal rhyme in fourth line). 

B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(1) Iambic, Jbcbcb; Early spring. 

(2) Iambic, 3^^ 3"^^: Song, "It is the miller's daughter," in The 
Miller'' s Daughter. 

(3) Iambic (with anapx'stic bars in refrain), ^-'^''bbx. -r//^ Sis- 
ters (i). 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 485 

(4) Iambic, 4 4^55 6- ^^^^ ^^S^^ ^o^S' "^ ^^^^ Princess, iv (inter- 
nal rhymes in the first and third lines). 

(5) Iambic, ^^^^^^: The Third of February, 1832. 

(6) Anapsestic, ^^^^^y; The Window, '^ K^r 

(7) Trochaic (with some dactylic bars), ^^^^''^ : Edith's Song, 
in Harold, iii, 2 (first stanza). 

(8) Trochaic, ^aaaab . gone, " Love that hath us in the net," in 

V / '444442 &' ' 

The Aliller^s Daughter. 

(9) Trochaic, ^'^'^^'^y: Forlorn. 
^^' '434343 

(10) Trochaic, abaabx. jy^^ Toiirney (internal rhyme in first 
^ ' '434433 -^ ^ ■' 

line, and variations in second stanza). 

C. Where the Lines vary in Loigth in the Differetit Stajtzas. 
(i) Iambic, ababcc: "Come not, when I am dead." 

VII. Groups of Seven Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i) Three-stress iambic, ababxyx: Maud, I, xi. 

(2) Four-stress iambic, abacc xx: Song — the Owl (i). 

(3) Four-stress iambic, a a a a b b b : Fatima. 

(4) P'ive-stress iambic, a b a b a b a : Tristram's Song, " Free love — 
free field," in The Last Tournarneitt. 

(5) Five-stress iambic, aabbbcc: To Dante. 

(6) Four-stress trochaic, a b a b b c c (rhyme-order of the Rhyme 
Royal) : So7ig — the Owl (2). 

(7) Three-stress dactylic: abababb: Camma's Song, in The 
Cup, i, 2. 

(8) Four-stress dactylic : a b a b x x x : Rifle?nen Form ! 

(9) Five-stress dactylic : aaaaaaa: To Alfred Tennyson, my 
Grandson. 

B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(1) l^x.\^ic,l\lY-^\-. Jaek Tar. 

(2) Anapaestic, a^bbxxa. Marian's Song, in The Foresters, iv, i. 



486 CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 

(3) Anapaestic, ^ Jj^^^j : Dora's Song, in The Promise of May, i 
internal rhyme in second line). 

(4) Trochaic, jj^^^^gt Milkmaid's Song, in Queen Mary, iii, 5. 

(5) Trochaic, ^^'^^ 4^2' *^^^"^^"'y"^® ^^^"^^- ^ ^i^g^- 

(6) Trochaic, ^abbccc. jy^^ Window, "At the Window." 

^/ 4444442 



VIII. Groups of Eight Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i) Three-stress iambic, aabaaabx: Scarlet's Song, in The 
Foresters, iii, i. (The second stanza has but seven lines.) 

(2) Four-stress iambic, xabacded, with internal rhyme in fifth 
line : Lady Clara Vere de Vere. 

(3) Four-stress iambic, a b a b c b d b, with internal rhyme in fifth 
line : The Beggar Maid. 

(4) Four-stress iambic, ababbccb: " Move eastward, happy 
earth " (first stanza). 

(5) Four-stress iambic, abababab: "Life of the Life within 
my Blood." 

(6) Five-stress iambic, ababcacb: Tristram's Song, " Ay, ay, 
O ay," in The Last Tournament. 

(7) Five-stress iambic, ababcbcb: The Roses on the Terrace. 

(8) Four-stress trochaic, aabbcddc: Poets and Critics. 

(9) Four-stress trochaic, aabaccca: Cradle-Song, in Sea 
Dreams. 

(10) Two-stress dactylic, abcaacba: Rosamund's Song, in 
Becket, iii, i. 

B. Where the LJnes vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Iambic, abababab Dora's Song, in The Promise of 
^ ' '43434343 *" -^ 

May, iii. 

(2) Anapaestic, ^^''^^^22* harvest Song, in The Promise of 

May, ii. 

(t,) Trochaic, ^^^^^^'''': "Sweet and low," in The Princess, iii 
^•^' 43434435 

(internal rhyme in third line). 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 487 

(4) Dactylic, ababcbcb. jy^^ Window, "The Letter." (The 

\'/ ^44424444 V 

fourth Hne in the second stanza has but one stress.) 



C. Where the Lines vaiy in Length in the Different Stanzas. 
( 1 ) Iambic, abcbdbeb: The Poet's Song. 

IX. Groups of Nine Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 
(i ) Eight-stress trochaic, aaaaaaaaa: ' Frater Ave atque Vale. 

B. Where the Lines vary in Length ivithin the Stanza. 

( I ) I ambic, a X a X a a X a X . jy^ ^ Ballad of Oria na . 

abaabcddc 
444433443 



(2) Iambic, ^^^^?^f ';^ The Death of the Old Year. 



(3) Iambic, with trochaic variations, aaaabcccb tail -rhyme 

444444443 •' 

stanza: Sir Lanncelot and Queen Guinevere. In The L^ady of 
Shalott the b lines form a refrain. 

(4) Iambic, Spenserian Stanza, ababbcbcc. jy^^ ^^^^^. 
Eaters. 

(5) Anapaestic, '^''^^^^^'''': Dan Smith's Song, in The Promise 

442244444 <j 

of May, ii (internal rhyme in fifth line). 



C. Where the Lines vary in Length in the Different Stanzas. 

(i) Trochaic, aabaabbba: Song, "O diviner Air," in The 
Sisters (2). (The second stanza has only eight lines.) 



X. Groups of Ten Lines. 

A. Where the LJnes are all of the same Length. 

( 1 ) Three-stress trochaic, xyabaccdxy: The Snowdrop. 

(2) Four-stress trochaic, aabccbdddb: The Window, " No 
Answer" (2). 

(3) Six-stress dactylic, abbacaaccc; Duet, in Becket, ii, i. 



488 CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 



B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Two five-stress iambic close quatrains connected by refrain 
lines, abbaxcddcx. ^ Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie 
Alexandrovna. (Cf. " Ask me no more.") 

(2) Trochaic, ^^^^^^'^'^^^j the last line a refrain: Opening of 

^ ' 4444444443 •J-/ 

the Indian and Colonial Exhibition. 



XI. Groups of Eleven Lines. 

A. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza., and the 
Rhyme-Order varies from Stanza to Stattza. 

(i) Iambic, 44444444443: Recollections of the Arabian 
Nights. 

XII. Groups of Twelve Lines. 

A. Where the Lines are all of the same Length. 

(i ) Four-stress iambic, ababcddcxyxy: Mariana in the 
South. (Cf. Mariana?) 

B. Where the Lines vary in Length within the Stanza. 

(i) Iambic, "abaxacadyey. Foresters' Song, in The Foresters ;\\,\. 
^ ' '334333433333 ^ 

(2) Iambic, ababcddcxyxy. j/,,;.,-,„^. 
^ ' '4 444 4444434 3 

(3) Iambic, ^\^^^^,''\^''V-. Hands All Round. 
vj/ '444444442455 

(4) Iambic, ababcdcdefgf. ^■^. Galahad (internal rhyme in 

\t/ '434344434444 V J 

eleventh line). 

(5) Anapaestic, ^^^J^^J^ 4 4 44= -S'^^^ ('A spirit haunts the year's 
last hours "). 

XIII. Groups of Thirteen Lines. 

A. Where the Lines vary iti Length within the Staiiza. 
(I) Iambic, ^babcdcdefefr The Progress of Sprtng (In some 
stanzas the ninth line has but three stresses.) 



CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 489 

XIV. Groups of Fourteen Lines (Sonnets). 

A. Petrarchan. 

(1) abbaabbacdecde: A lexander ; Poland ; The Brides- 
maid ; Prefatory to the '•Nineteenth Century^ ; To the Rev. W. H. 
Brookfield ; Montenegro ; To Victor Hugo ; Poets and their Bibli- 
ographies ; Show-Day at Battle Abbey, iSyb. 

(2) abbaabbacdedce: "The form, the form alone is elo- 
quent " ; To W. C. Macready. 

(3) abbaabbacdcdcd: Doubt and Prayer. [12 poems.] 

B. Irregular. 

(i) abbacddcefgefg: To ("As when with downcast 

eyes we muse and brood"). 

(2)abbacaacdededd: To J. M. K. 

(3) abbaacacdefdef: " Mine be the strength of spirit, full 
and free." 

(4) abbabaabcdecde: Buonaparte. 

(5) a b a b b a b a c d e c d e : " Caress'd or chidden by the slender 
hand." 

(6) ababababcdecde: "Wan Sculptor, weepest thou to 
take the cast." 

(7) abbacdcdacdcda: "If I were loved, as I desire to be." 
[7 poems.] 



XV. Lines of equal Length arranged without Stanzaic Form or 
fixed Rhyme-Order. 

(i) Four-stress iambic: Supposed Cofifessions of a Second-rate 

Sensitive Mind ; To (" Clear-headed friend, whose joyful 

scorn"); To ("Thou may'st remember what I said"). 

(2) Five-stress iambic : The Kraken ; Love and Death ; Circum- 
stance ; The Visioft of Sin, iii. 

(3) Five-stress anapaestic : Maud, III. 

(4) Six-stress anapaestic : Maud, I, ii. 

(5) Two-stress trochaic : Drinking Song, in The Foresters, i, 2. 

(6) Four-stress trochaic : The Silent Voices. (The last line has 
but three stresses.) 



490 CLASSIFICATION OF THE METRES 

(7) Four-stress dactylic : A Welcome to Alexandra (with refrain). 

(8) Six-stress dactylic : Aland, I, iii ; The Defence of Lucknow 
(with some seven-stress lines and a refrain). 



XVI. Free Lyrical Forms (Odes, etc.) with Irregular Strophes. 



I 



Claribel ; Nothing will Die; All Things will Die; Lilian; 
Isabel; Madeline ; Ode to Memory ; The Poefs Mind; The Sea- 
Fairies ; The Deserted House ; The Dying Swan ; The Merman ; 
The Mermaid ; Adeline; Margaret; Rosalind; Elednore ; Choric 
Song, in The Lotos-Eaters ; The Vision of Sin, ii ; Ode on the Death 
of the Duke of Wellington ; The Charge of the Light Brigade; Ode 
sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition ; Will ; The 
Islet; The Victim ; "Flower in the crannied wall"; The Window, 
" Gone," " Winter," " Spring," " The Answer " ; Maud, I, v, vi, viii, 
ix, X, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii ; II, i, ii, iii, iv, v ; The 
Revenge ; The Htonan Cry ; The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at 
Balaclava ; Edith's Song, in Harold, iii, 2 (second strophe) ; 
Titania's Song, in The Foresters, ii, 2 ; June Bracken and Heather ; 
The Dreamer; Song of the Three Sisters, in The Hesperides. 
[57 poems.] ^^ L^ ^^ 



3lj.77-7 



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